Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger, prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith (formerly the Holy Office) since 1983, has exercised enormous influence within the Catholic Church. In late 2002, he was elected dean of the College of Cardinals, a largely ceremonial and honorary position to be sure, but one that reflects his continuing influence...
Gore Vidal, award-winning essayist, novelist, and playwright, has been a keen observer of American culture and politics for several decades. Yet when he originally submitted to major American magazines of opinion the essay that forms the first chapter of his new book, Perpetual War for Perpetual Peace, he found himself completely shut out. No one...
John T. Flynn had the distinction of being singled out by Franklin D. Roosevelt as a writer who “should be barred hereafter from the columns of any presentable daily paper, monthly magazine, or national quarterly.” Until the New Deal came along, however, Flynn had never been known as a conservative. During the 1920’s, he served...
This November may not turn out to be as dull and depressing as it once appeared. Ralph Nader’s charmingly quixotic bid for the White House, based on getting the United States out of NAFTA, GATT, and Bosnia, will doubtless add some substance to the presidential contest, but the most exciting race this November will occur...
The conventional wisdom regarding the Internet appears to have changed practically overnight. Once championed as a wonderful Information-Age tool to “empower the individual,” the net is now more likely to be denounced as an iniquitous network of right-wing conspiracy theorists and former Luftwaffe pilots. I would be the last person to peddle a gospel of...
It is a rare polemicist who makes a successful career in fiction. But in The Fountainhead (1943) and Atlas Shrugged (1957)—and with all the subtlety of dropping a grand piano on her reader’s head—Ayn Rand conveyed her harsh philosophy to a broad audience and gamed what has invariably been described as a cult following. Rand’s...
Most of us recognize that cries for “tolerance” have become the left’s weapon of choice in its erosion of those few civilized norms that remain in American life. The image the left likes to conjure up is that of an ignorant band of rednecks sadistically persecuting homosexuals or other minorities, when the truth is that...
Four years at Harvard have made me much thicker-skinned than I used to be. To be sure, it was more than a little unsettling when my freshman dormitory held a mandatory sensitivity session at which each student was forced to say: “Hello, my name is . . . , and I’m gay.” But after seeing...