Category: Catholic

  • Alasdair MacIntyre on the Writing of History

    Tributes to Alasdair MacIntyre published since his death on May 21, 2025 have noted his impact on a wide range of academic fields, not just philosophy. His work has shaped inquiry in the fields of theology, political theory, sociology, psychology, classics, communication, law, education, and many more. Even business ethics, a

  • Louis Althusser’s Nonexistence

    Marxist philosopher Louis Althusser’s life story begins in Algeria in 1918, as part of the French colonial diaspora. It ends in Paris, with him as the murderer of his elderly wife Hélène, occasionally stalking the city streets (when not in mental hospitals) and disconcerting bystanders by bellowing, Je suis le

  • Volodya in Paradise: On Vladimir Nabokov

    It was 1970 or thereabouts, and I was an undergraduate of middling achievements. On my own, not for a class, I had just read Vladimir Nabokov’s Pale Fire—the whole mad thing: the forward, the poem, the commentary, and even the index, with its haunting coda, “A distant northern land.” I

  • Original Sin: The Bare Truth

    One of the fascinating bits of the Bible’s account of our first parents has to do with the fact that they are described as being naked. The Scriptures are, for the most part, rather withholding in terms of providing descriptive details of how Adam and Eve might have looked. But

  • The New Feminism, Then and Now

    The New Feminism is so much a part of my professional and personal and spiritual life—for over thirty years—that I have struggled to separate it out and hold it up for inspection. I even thought of naming this paper “Reflections and Confessions of a New Feminist Lab Rat.” But inspect