Joseph Bottum is a writer, poet, and essayist who served as literary editor of The Weekly Standard before becoming editor of First Things magazine. He contributed extensively to the magazine from 1996 to 2016, writing on literature, religion, culture, and bioethics. A prominent Catholic intellectual, he is known for his wide-ranging essays blending literary criticism with moral and theological reflection.
TWO DAYS AFTER the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson opened themselves to national condemnation by declaring that the terrorists’ success was a direct judgment of God, visited upon the United States for the sins of abortionists, feminists,…
LATE AFTERNOON on Christmas Eve, the year I was eleven, my father took me with him across the river. I can't remember what the urgency was, but he needed some papers signed by a rancher who lived over on the other side of the Missouri from Pierre. So off we headed, west over the bridge and north…
Collected Poems
I ONCE PICKED UP the phone and called an author who'd submitted a piece of writing. I thought I could publish it, I said, but there was something a little off in the final line, and maybe she and I could work our way through the problem together. First there was a silence from her, then a…
The Hidden Life For the poet Dana Gioia, upon his taking a public office, as chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts
THERE WAS TRENT LOTT on one side, and now Rick Santorum on the other. Like bookends, they seem to frame the war with Iraq--each subject to an attack in which an offhand comment is taken by opponents for a steed and ridden to death with spurs. Some commentators (and many, many politicians) hoped…
[img_assist|nid=|title=|desc=|link=none|align=right|width=|height=] THERE'S A HUNGER in the world of public intellectuals and chattering commentators--among everyone from Unitarian peace activists to hawkish Catholic neoconservatives--for just-war theory to work like a gumball machine: You pay your…
BOTH SENATOR TOM DASCHLE and Bishop Robert Carlson responded to yesterday's article after its publication with prepared statements. Neither denied the existence of the letter, but both refused to discuss the contents of what one Catholic official in Sioux Falls angrily described as "private…
TOM DASCHLE may no longer call himself a Catholic. The Senate minority leader and the highest ranking Democrat in Washington has been sent a letter by his home diocese of Sioux Falls, sources in South Dakota have told The Weekly Standard, directing him to remove from his congressional biography and…
THE BRITISH always tended to run their empire on the cheap. Even fighting Napoleon, they didn't want to spend much money: Wellington's letters from Portugal are filled with complaints about how hard it is to chisel money out of the Horse Guards and the War Office--and that was to build the Lines of…
I THOUGHT PERHAPS I was invited to the White House because Laura Bush likes my poetry. Maybe not--in fact, probably not, since there are much better poets around. Still, for one reason or another, a nicely printed invitation came, asking me to join Mrs. Bush on February 12 for a reception and…
Apauling
THERE'S SOMETHING IRRESISTIBLE about the anti-war poetry that's been pouring out of England. Came a Motion. Went a Motion. Came a Paulin. He went, too. Now Harold Pinter finds a printer: Something extra, just for you.
IT'S ALL RATHER COMPLICATED. You see, there are West-coast Straussians and East-coast Straussians, and the West-coast Straussians think that the East-coast Straussians . . . except that Harvey Mansfield . . . still, back at the University of Chicago . . . in Xenophon . . . but when Allan Bloom and…
YOU MAY WANT TO DROWN England's poet laureate in his butt of sack when you read his new quatrain "Causa Belli." Not that Andrew Motion is a particularly bad example of his species: Between Dryden in 1670 and Wordsworth in 1843, the laureateship went to Thomas Shadwell, Nahum Tate, Nicholas Rowe,…
A FEW DAYS AGO--the night of January 1, as it happens--British television's Channel 4 aired a program about art in China that featured photographs of performance artist Zhu Yu eating the corpse of a stillborn baby.
YOU MAY HAVE MISSED IT in all the Raelian cloning news, but Channel 4 of British television began the New Year with a broadcast about a Chinese performance artist who eats a baby's corpse. Described by executives of Channel 4 as a "thought-provoking film about extreme art in China," the documentary…
IT'S ALMOST IMPOSSIBLE not to know how it opens. "Marley was dead: to begin with. There is no doubt whatever about that." Charles Dickens's "A Christmas Carol" has been filmed at least forty-two times and dramatized for the stage in dozens of versions--the first almost immediately after the book's…
WHAT FADES IN MEMORY is not the fact but the feeling. I can call up nearly every detail of those Christmases like frozen frames of recollection:
THANKSGIVING WAS ALWAYS TENSE while I was growing up, and I don't know why. Christmas, now--Christmas was mostly fun and presents and carols and laughter, as I remember. But Thanksgiving was arguments and huffs and recriminations and doors slamming and one indistinguishable great-uncle or another…
AT THREE IN THE MORNING, I gave up. A rejoicing sort of giving up, you understand, as Jean Carnahan's concession speech meant the Republicans had done it--seized control of the Senate, made it work. George W. Bush has turned into a man so presidential than he can even campaign for his party without…
YESTERDAY, the White House announced the choice of the poet Dana Gioia for chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts. This is the job that Mr. Gioia was born for--or perhaps that's better put the other way around: Mr. Gioia is the kind of person for whom the job of chairing the NEA was first…
IF YOU HAVEN'T been able to read all the writing about Pius XII, the Catholic Church, and the Holocaust, you needn't feel too bad. Not even scholars in the field have been able to keep up. By my count, there have been at least fourteen books on the subject in the last three years, with the threat…
ONCE AT A PARTY here in Washington, I challenged a well-known political reporter--a man who makes his living covering the ins and outs of America's elections--to name the junior senator from South Dakota. After a moment's fruitless effort, he quipped, "South Dakota doesn't actually have two…
WHEN COLIN POWELL announced last Tuesday the administration's decision to shift to other organizations $34 million earmarked for the United Nations Fund for Population Activities, the reaction was apoplectic. "Bush Denies Women Health Care, Human Rights," read one editorial headline. "The World's…
Our Posthuman Future Consequences of the Biotechnology Revolution by Francis Fukuyama Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 272 pp., $25 FRANCIS FUKUYAMA is right, of course, when he says in his new book, "Our Posthuman Future," that we should be frightened by the Brave New World that eugenic biotechnology…
HERE'S A juxtaposition, for you--a pair of enjambed propositions fresh from Thursday's Washington Post: "In November, researchers announced that they had made the first human embryo clones, giving immediacy to warnings by religious conservatives and others that science is no longer serving the…
[img nocaption float="right" width="144" height="193" render="<%photoRenderType%>"]8794[/img]IT'S ALMOST IMPOSSIBLE not to know how it opens. "Marley was dead: to begin with. There is no doubt whatever about that." Charles Dickens's "A Christmas Carol" has been filmed at least forty-two times and…
This essay is reprinted in The Best Christian Writing 2002, edited by John Wilson (HarperSan Francisco).
ON NOVEMBER 29, the Japanese government's council for science and technology policy announced that Japan would allow human cells to be implanted into fertilized animal eggs for research purposes. Our old nightmares had it wrong. This is really how the apocalypse begins: with a minor announcement at…
THANKSGIVING WAS ALWAYS tense while I was growing up, and I don't know why. Christmas, now--Christmas was fun and presents and carols and laughter, as I remember. But Thanksgiving was arguments and huffs and recriminations and doors slamming and one indistinguishable great-uncle or another rousing…
We meet our griefs again when work is through and do with words what little words can do. A stranger weeps beside us through the night. Beneath our pleasant sun, we never knew the dark that hates the sky for being bright. We thought to build a garden without rue, to climb and, all-beloved, to reach…
I RECEIVED A PRESS RELEASE this week that says the Duchess of York is coming to Macy's on December 4. Joining her at the famous New York City department store--a beloved American landmark, right in the heart of Manhattan--will be a parade of celebrities, including baseball's legendary "Mr.…
THE MESSAGES CHALKED on the sidewalks and asphalt pathways across Stanford University are enough to make you cringe--in part, of course, for what they intend to say, but even more for how they say it. "War is bad for children and other small animals," the pastel scrawl near the library read. "You…
THE FIRST SUSAN SONTAG CERTIFICATE--The Weekly Standard's way of recognizing inanity by intellectuals and artists in the wake of the terrorist attacks--goes, of course, to the essayist and novelist Susan Sontag for her note in the Sept. 24 issue of the New Yorker. She managed, in the space of only…
THOUGH I GRUDGINGLY ADMIT to doing many things that cause me some degree of embarrassment—cow-tipping, white slaving, parking in my church’s first-time-visitor’s space for 73 consecutive Sundays—I fly my freak flag high when disclosing that I watch lots of bad television. To some snobs, the…
I MEANT TO ASK ALDO what he thought about Restoration comedy: Wycherly, Congreve, Steele, and Sheridan; all those sly, quick-witted plays with titles like The Way of the World and The School for Scandal. I meant to call him on the phone for a long conversation or even—why not?—take a few hours off…
MORTON KONDRACKE IS A REPORTER in Washington, D.C., and a name to conjure with: a writer for the Capitol Hill newspaper Roll Call, a star on the political television program The Beltway Boys, an original member of The McLaughlin Group, a man who has followed the ins and outs of American politics…
THIS WILL NEVER DO. You can measure the failure of Philip Roth’s latest novel, The Dying Animal, by the comments on the back cover. There’s the blurb from the Times Literary Supplement that acclaims Roth’s three prior novels for the "radical individualism" of which they were, in fact, the greatest…
Last week, the Brownback-Weldon bill to prohibit human cloning was introduced on Capitol Hill. And the arguments against it are . . . well, as it turns out, there really aren't many arguments against a ban on manufacturing human beings like gingerbread men from a cookie cutter.
ON THURSDAY, OCTOBER 5, it was revealed that biotechnology researchers had successfully created a hybrid of a human being and a pig. A man-pig. A pig-man. The reality is so unspeakable, the words themselves don't want to go together.
I had come home twenty years too late, my childhood doctor Barbara Spears declared. It was primarily to see my grandmother that I took my wife and daughter back to South Dakota. But while there I put together a dinner with some of my parents' friends from the years we'd lived in Pierre: two or…
There is a case to be made that the Uncle Abner stories -- the twenty-two tales of the Virginia hills written by Melville Davisson Post from 1911 to 1928 -- are among the finest mysteries ever written.
All the leaves were brown and the sky was gray, the day we left Washington for California. Well, actually, it was July, so all the leaves were a sodden, wilting green, and the sky was that sullen, half-hazed blue you get in a smogged-over city with 90 percent humidity during the summer. But I was…
At age eighty-four, matched with a young wife and a new-born child, Saul Bellow has gathered his energies and delivered another novel, his first full-length work in fourteen years.
Here in Washington, up Connecticut Avenue, past Dupont Circle, there's a business with a sign that reads "Academy for Educational Development." As near as I can figure, that means it's the School for School School, and every time we drive by, my wife and I invent parallel names we'd like to see:…
When our daughter Faith was born, my wife Lorena and I lived in New York, in a two-bedroom apartment on the lower East Side. In fact, it was much more New Yorky than that. What we actually had was a pair of one-bedroom apartments, side by side. To throw a dinner party was to lead our guests from…
The Columbine killers are back. Back in grainy pictures from the surveillance camera in the cafeteria that caught a portion of their rampage through their high school in Littleton, Colorado, last April 20. Back in quotations taken from the five videotapes they made to explain and publicize…
WHAT FADES IN MEMORY is not the fact, but the feeling. I can call up every detail of those Christmases of my childhood. A cold sparrow peering out across the lawn from under the snow-covered lilac hedge, while I sat at the window, waiting for my parents to wake. My father cocking his head to the…
Steve Forbes has it right: The presence on the Princeton University faculty of Peter Singer -- the Australian animal-rights activist who proclaims that a baby is of less value than a pig and who advocates a 28-day trial period before accepting newborns into the human race -- is "intolerable and…
Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban
His Honor Anthony Williams
I suppose it was the time I beaned the historian Wilfred McClay with a wine cork -- blat! right between the eyes -- that I knew I'd never be one of Washington's great formal-dinner hosts. It's true he'd just claimed that if St. Ignatius Loyola were alive today, he would make a first-class director…
ON THE ENDLESS CABLE-TV TALK SHOWS, the call-in radio programs, and the newspaper editorial pages across America, the topic since April 20 has been Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold, the high-school murderers in Littleton, Colorado. The violence experts, the child psychologists, and the grief…
It was at the end of the nineteenth century that Friedrich Nietzsche denounced the "flatheads" who imagined they could preserve morality without God. Nietzsche didn't think much of the Western ethical tradition, but he sensed that it needed the continuing presence of religion: The culture that…
My father always insisted on an early Christmas breakfast -- a huge feast of eggs poached in milk, and bacon and hashbrowns and pancakes and marmalade and grapefruit and a sort of sweetened toast whose name I can't remember, but it tasted like corrugated cardboard with cinnamon and sugar sprinkled…
MY FATHER ALWAYS INSISTED on an early Christmas breakfast--a huge feast of eggs poached in milk, and bacon and hashbrowns and pancakes and marmalade and grapefruit and a sort of sweetened toast whose name I can't remember, but it tasted like corrugated cardboard with cinnamon and sugar sprinkled on…
They called him the "Emperor," and when he died on September 6 at the age of eighty-eight, the newspaper obituaries were filled with stories of Akira Kurosawa's imperious -- and imperial -- arrogance.
It is the mark of boys to mistake how things work for why they work, to become fascinated with the mechanisms that make the wheels go 'round and forget to watch where the train is going.
Every schoolboy used to know exactly when the modern world began. It was the 10th of November 1619, when a twenty-three-year-old French soldier named Rene Descartes curled up for the day in a "stove" (the heated guest room off a German inn's kitchen) and started to contemplate the rules by which…
You've known girls just like her: tiny, pretty, flirty young women -- energetic, talented, bright, and brittle. The kind who always wants to be an actress. The kind who makes old men long to pat her hand and middle-aged men buy sports cars. The kind who inevitably compels cliches -- smart as a…
Last week, my daughter Faith destroyed my lexicon of ancient Greek. Playing quietly half-hidden behind an armchair, she succeeded in tearing out a surprising number of pages before I caught her, and what she didn't tear she managed to fold, spindle, and mutilate. And it's while I was prying from…
Marilyn Manson
It's embarrassing for one working in an office full of writers with the true reporter's knack for getting interviews with the newsworthy and the notorious, but all the famous people I know I know vicariously.
There is at least one small proof that literary criticism will never be a science, and it's that there is no theory of art capable of explaining exactly why Kenneth Grahame's The Wind in the Willows is great fiction -- like George Borrow's The Bible in Spain or Mrs. Gaskell's Cranford, one of the…
Linda Simon
Dorothy L. Sayers & Jill Paton Walsh
J. V. Cunningham
Charles Frazier
Tom Sharpe
Every year it's a different carol that catches me and hauls me in. The first Christmas song always steals into town right after Thanksgiving, like the first gentle plink that signals a cloudburst, and within days the deluge is inescapable: the office elevators and the street corners and the stores…
EVERY YEAR it's a different carol that catches me and hauls me in. The first Christmas song always steals into town right after Thanksgiving, like the first gentle plink that signals a cloudburst, and within days the deluge is inescapable: the office elevators and the street corners and the stores…
Will Self
The problem with writing worse books is that they tend to reach back and infect an author's better books. Philip Roth, Norman Mailer, and John Updike have all, at one time or another, produced failures that managed mostly to expose problems they had successfully masked in their masterpieces. When…
Richard Russo
Paul Theroux
I USED TO THINK that stories were mostly lies, chunks of experience sanded down too neatly to be believed. Every tale I've ever told has run a little smoother in the telling than in the living. Recently, however, I have begun to wonder whether that isn't more a failure of my living--of my eyes to…
I used to think that stories were mostly lies, chunks of experience sanded down too neatly to be believed. Every tale I've ever told has run a little smoother in the telling than in the living. Recently, however, I have begun to wonder whether that isn't more a failure of my living -- of my eyes to…
T. S. Eliot
David Carkeet
Harry Mulisch
No one ever loved Graham Greene, though many thought him as fine a novelist as we've had these last 50 years. No one ever made a shrine of Erich Segal's boyhood home, though his 1970 Love Story sold in the millions. Adoration from readers does not belong to authors to command, and neither…
The first great, humbling confession that must be made by everyone who thinks about books is that we have no idea where books spring from. We may pretend from time to time that we have a notion of the mechanisms of creation, but most literary criticism and biography are like a careful…
By any typical measure, Mary Kay Zuravleff's The Frequency of Souls (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 244 pages, $ 23) is not a very good book. A tale of love, death, and refrigerators, this short first novel by a thirty- six-year-old former editor at the Smithsonian is not so much full of holes as full…
If I were to say that the novel is an utterly heterosexual form of art -- simultaneously an instrument and an expression of the relations between men and women -- I would be entering realms so socially awkward and aesthetically complex that it hardly seems worth the effort. An openly homosexual…
If conscious novelists are the novelists who cannot begin writing until they know what they're going to say, then unconscious novelists are the ones who have no idea what they're going to say until after they've said it. Though no writer has ever managed to achieve either perfect consciousness or…
An idea-novel is not a novel of ideas; it's not even necessarily a novel. An idea-novel is the novel as conceptual art, the novel in which an idea the author has for structuring a book becomes the only meaning in the book, triumphing over theme, development, and even plot. In recent years,…
It is not voice that makes Roddy Doyle's novels run, though ever since his first -- The Commitments, a comic 1987 tale of a gang of poor Dublin kids trying to form an American-style soul band -- the Irish novelist has garnered praise for giving realistic modern voice to the poverty-stricken…
It is not voice that makes Roddy Doyle's novels run, though ever since his first -- The Commitments, a comic 1987 tale of a gang of poor Dublin kids trying to form an American-style soul band -- the Irish novelist has garnered praise for giving realistic modern voice to the poverty-stricken…
When you read an essay that begins, "I am an, Orthodox rabbi and gay," what can you say? I mean, this is not like, "I am a Trappist monk who snorkels." We have passed beyond the merely improbable to a world where language is capable of statements like, "I am a vegetarian butcher." It's not so much…
When you read an essay that begins, "I am an, Orthodox rabbi and gay," what can you say? I mean, this is not like, "I am a Trappist monk who snorkels." We have passed beyond the merely improbable to a world where language is capable of statements like, "I am a vegetarian butcher." It's not so much…
The problem is they write too well, our literary boys. There's hardly a novelist now alive whose schooled prose cannot paint in sharp detail almost anything you'd care to name: a catastrophic train wreck, the death of a giant redwood tree, the way the tone-arm on an old Philco hi-fi would quiver…
The problem is they write too well, our literary boys. There's hardly a novelist now alive whose schooled prose cannot paint in sharp detail almost anything you'd care to name: a catastrophic train wreck, the death of a giant redwood tree, the way the tone-arm on an old Philco hi-fi would quiver…
It's such a small thing the American novelist Oscar Hijuelos has done: just a little twist in the narrative structure of the novel of recollection, too technical on its face to be of much interest to any but the most determined scholar. But with it, Hijuelos--author of last year's Mr. Ives'…
There's just no getting around the fact that Jerzy Kosinski was a toad. James Park Sloan's new biography, Jerzy Kosinski (Dutton, 505 pages, $ 27.95), is as fair an account of the Polish-American novelist as we are likely to get, and Kosinski still comes off as a liar, a cheat, and a world-class…
W. H. Auden was a self-destructive chain-smoker, an amphetamine addict, an alcoholic of titanic proportions, an unhappy homosexual, a man who fled embattled England just as the Second World War began, and, for a time at least, an active proselytizer for the Communist party. But to say that he was…
He wanted so much for it all to be true. The Romantics had told him that the world makes no sense in modern times -- the Modernists would later tell him it never had -- but everyone told the German novelist Thomas Mann that the artist is the strong man who hammers out a heroic meaning for this…