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Politics & Society
Books
Aug 04, 2008 issueMissing from most of the national immigration debate has been the humanitarian aspects of the migration phenomenon.
Letters
Dumb Brutes
Regarding Stafford Betty’s “Letter to a Reluctant Atheist” (4/14): It is very difficult to conceive of contemplative experience divorced from any theological construct. After all, human nature is rational. We strive to find answers to our fundamental questions, to find meaning in and around us. To experience anything at all without finding meaning or adequately understanding what has been experienced amounts to life in the animal kingdom.
Joanna Ionescu
FaithOf Many Things
The pope visits Yankee Stadium, and other sacred moments in secular spaces.
Do the questions science poses diminish the God of faith?
Not so long ago, chastity, the virtue that single people practice by abstaining from sex and married people by being faithful to their spouses, was regarded as a mainstream value. Even people who failed to live up to it generally recognized it as normal and normative. Today, however, the mainstream status of chastity is attenuated, to say the least. This attenuation has been both reflected in the law and promoted by it.
On the day I write this column, The New York Times has published side by side on its front page two articles that embody the divergent possibilities of our future in Iraq. The United States, contrary to all previous statements, will join Iran and Syria in talks on Iraq. As the Iraq Study Group had e
Time magazine’s person of the year was a mirror: Behold YOU. Yourself. You can do it. You did it. Be all you can be. YouTube. You are the star. It is a proclamation of pure, absolute narcissism. The world ends at my face. Me. My space. My autonomy. I rule my world. Perhaps the deepest moral ch
A newly fashionable atheism has emerged in public discourse. Religious faith, in this account, is not only quaint; it is dangerous. In a recent conference titled Science, Religion, Reason and Survival, sponsored by the Templeton Foundation, religion took a beating. Steven Weinberg, a Nobel laureate
Of Many Things
I have had to learn three hard lessons about political life. First, perception “is” reality. Second, loyalty counts more than morality. Third, symbols trump reasoned argument. These are lessons every natural-born politician knows. But, I confess, in my case they may never take firm hold.