The Public Square

Richard John Neuhaus

Copyright (c) 2001 First Things 113 (May 2001): 67-88.

Bible Babel

“If I had the authority,” declared the leader of an evangelical parachurch empire, “I’d almost be ready to decree that we go back to the King James.” That in response to my having written here that, if I had the authority, everybody would use the Revised Standard Version. The sorry fact is that English–speaking Christians have largely lost a common biblical vocabulary as a consequence of the proliferation of translations—and of paraphrases passing as translations—over the last forty years. I am told that there are nearly two hundred English translations on the market now, and Bible printers keep churning out new ones, for there seems to be a near insatiable market. There are designer translations for teenagers, mothers, business people, speakers of ebonics (stereotyped black talk), and just about any other market niche or itch that one can imagine.

The result is that little or nothing can be taken for granted when it comes to the recognition of biblical passages or phrases. It is not exactly a matter of biblical illiteracy, for it would seem that millions are regularly reading the Bible, which is a very good thing. But there is little shared biblical language among Christians, and, predictably, ever fewer biblical references in the public culture. The last consequence is not entirely due to the multiplication of versions, of course, but that, one cannot help but believe, is part of it.

When in the 1950s J. B. Phillips published his loose but suggestive translation of parts of the New Testament, it seemed like a breath of fresh air. No less a literary authority than C. S. Lewis wrote an appreciative introduction for Phillips’ Letters to Young Churches. But now things have gotten quite out of hand, as every Bible student who has a new idea about what the text really means decides not to write a commentary on the text but to rewrite the text. Catholic lay people, it is no secret, were not heavy–duty Bible readers before the Second Vatican Council. But for public and private purposes, the English text was the Douay–Rheims translation of the Latin Vulgate, first appearing in the sixteenth century and updated until 1763. After the Council, Catholics, too, got into new translations, notably with the Jerusalem Bible, the New Jerusalem Bible, and then, from the Confraternity of Christian Doctrine, regular updatings of the New American Bible.

At present, three translations are approved for Catholic liturgical use: the New Jerusalem, the RSV, and the New American Bible (NAB). The lectionaries and the several publishers of Mass guides, however, use only the NAB. It is, not to put too fine a point on it, a wretched translation. It succeeds in being, at the same time, loose, stilted, breezy, vulgar, opaque, and relentlessly averse to literary grace. The bishops had the NAB updated to the Revised New American Bible (RNAB), but Rome had objections to that and hurriedly appointed a committee to fix it up into what might be called the Amended Revised New American Bible (ARNAB), which will soon become mandatory in lectionary use. Technically, the RSV and New Jerusalem are still permitted but, with ARNAB as the mandatory translation of the future, nobody has any interest in printing lectionaries or Mass guides using those versions. There is the additional oddity that you cannot buy an ARNAB Bible, since only the pericopes (liturgical readings) exist in ARNAB–talk. So Catholics do not have a Bible for personal or group reading that uses the same text that they hear at Mass.

An additional wrinkle is that the Canadian bishops approved for liturgical use the New Revised Standard Version (NRSV), with its gender–inclusive and dumbed–down language. Rome overruled the bishops, but the Canadians said, in effect, “Too bad, but thousands upon thousands of lectionaries have already been printed in NRSV.” So Rome said that no more could be printed, but the ones already printed could be used. Not surprisingly, there is reportedly a very brisk business of “progressive” priests in the U.S. importing Canadian lectionaries. It is, all in all, a sorry tale.

As if the above is not confusion enough, there is in addition the Liturgy of Hours, the breviary for daily prayer. There the psalms are from the 1963 Grail translation, with other biblical canticles translated by the International Committee on English in the Liturgy (ICEL) and yet others by the International Consultation on English Texts (ICET), with the result that, as also in daily Mass guides used by the people, the very same texts frequently appear in different translations. The antiphon to a psalm that is taken from the psalm being read, for example, is often worded differently from the way it appears in the psalm. The banality of the translations does not invite the memorization of biblical texts, and the different and frequently conflicting translations make such memorization impossible. The incessant patchwork meddling and updating of liturgical reform in the last several decades has produced what critics describe as a “destabilizing of the sacramental order.” That destabilization is dramatically evident also in the mish–mash that has been made of biblical translations.

The Conciliar Vision

That, one may suggest with considerable confidence, is not what the fathers of the Council had in mind. Section 22 of Dei Verbum (The Word of God): “But since the word of God should be available at all times, the Church with maternal concern sees to it that suitable and correct translations are made into different languages, especially from the original texts of the sacred books. And if, given the opportunity and the approval of Church authority, these translations are produced in cooperation with the separated brethren as well, all Christians will be able to use them.” At least in the English–speaking world, that maternal concern has been seriously delinquent; there are no common translations among Catholics, never mind translations used by all Christians in common. Again, the word of God in the ARNAB version to be used in liturgy, unsatisfactory as it is, is not available at all in the form of a complete Bible. In the absence of a quality English text, it seems that Catholics will have to put up with a linguistic destabilization of Babel–like proportions.

A not uninteresting sidelight is that St. John’s University in Collegeville, Minnesota, sometimes described as a training camp for liturgical terrorists, is spending several million dollars to have a scribe illuminate on vellum the entire Bible. You may have noticed the news stories on that. It’s a lovely idea, except that the text to be used is the NRSV. So here we will have a beautifully illuminated vellum manuscript that will last a thousand years, with a trendy text—and, not incidentally, a text officially disapproved by Rome—that is as dated as last year’s edition of the politically correct handbook.

There are some fine and generally felicitous translations available: The New American Standard, the New International Version (NIV), the New Jerusalem, and, above all, the RSV. The NIV is by far the most used among evangelical Protestants who don’t use the King James Version (which is often used in one of several modified forms, such as the New King James, which pretty much limits its revisions to replacing obsolete words and phrases that would not be understood today). Catholics will, for the foreseeable future, be stuck with ARNAB in public reading, and then whatever version for personal and group study. Of the many versions available, one hopes they will choose to counter the rude liberties taken by ARNAB with the gracefully accurate text of the RSV.

Cradle Catholics, and Others

At the risk of generalizing, let me generalize. It applies to Catholics but not to Catholics only, as we will see. A reviewer of Avery Cardinal Dulles’ fine little introduction to Catholicism, The New World of Faith, was puzzling over why he really didn’t like the book. Then it struck him that Dulles, as an adult convert, treats Catholicism as a discovery, while for the reviewer, a cradle Catholic, the Church is the inherited and taken for granted reality. Dulles writes about Catholicism as a “magnificent artifact” to be cherished and cared for, whereas for the reviewer being Catholic is mainly a matter of, as he puts it, “negotiating an accommodation with the larger culture.”

In other words, for Dulles that “larger culture” is the inherited and taken for granted reality, while Catholicism is the new and exciting thing. The pastor of a Catholic parish tells me that he would not want a priest on his staff who does not read the New York Times every day. He said nothing about whether the priest should pray his office, the Liturgy of Hours, every day. Clearly, the pastor is in the mode of negotiating with the larger culture; the goal is rising above the Catholic thing, not deeper immersion in the Catholic thing.

Similarly, a friend who taught at an Ivy League university for years underwent a born–again experience under Baptist auspices. For his sabbatical year he decided to teach at an evangelical college. He discovered, he said, that his most self–consciously sophisticated evangelical colleagues at the college were the most parochial. They were so touchingly eager to demonstrate to him and others that they were in conversation with what he viewed as the stiflingly parochial discourses of the Ivy League that he knew all too well. They evidenced, he said, a practiced aloofness from, bordering on contempt for, the Baptist faith and life that was for him a refreshing alternative to “the larger culture.”

The Catholic counterparts of those colleagues are legion. Priests and academics born into Catholicism tend to know all the inside stories, the flaws and foibles and legendary figures of the Church, and can regale one another with the rich lore of its characters and scandals. It is one big extended family. In that company, status is often contingent upon demonstrating that one has transcended the “Catholic ghetto.” That explains, at least in large part, why dissent from official teaching carries the panache of being sophisticated. The disposition is: “Yes, I am a Catholic (or a priest, or a theologian), but I think for myself.” The remarkably improbable assumption is that what one thinks up by oneself is more interesting than what the Church teaches.

That view is frequently marked by what might be called ecclesiastical fundamentalism. The fundamental realities that constitute the Church are so taken for granted that it is simply inconceivable that dissent or taking liberties at the edges could do any real damage. Typically, such people really do love the Church, it really is their mother, but, like adolescents breaking loose from parental tutelage, they feel a need to distance themselves from her embrace. That would seem to be the case with the reviewer who is puzzled by Cardinal Dulles’ discovery of Catholicism as a “magnificent artifact.” It may be easier for converts, but for everyone that sense of discovery and rediscovery is the key that opens the door to what Cardinal Dulles calls The New World of Faith.

Eliminating the Soul

Today we speak of clinical depression, but going back as far as we have records of what people thought, the phenomenon was called melancholy. It is from two Greek words, melas (black) and khole (bile). Melancholy has to do with humoral states, the Greeks taught. As there are four elements—earth, air, fire, and water—so human health depends upon the right balance among four humors or substances in the body: blood, phlegm, black bile, and yellow bile. The spleen was commonly thought to be the villain in producing black bile, an excessive amount of which produced melancholy, although sometimes blame was attached to the gallbladder as well. (The fact that I had both removed some years ago may help explain my relentlessly sunny disposition.) These matters are treated in a manner both charming and instructive by Jennifer Radden of the University of Massachusetts in a new anthology, The Nature of Melancholy: From Aristotle to Kristeva (Oxford University Press).

The anthology includes, of course, an extensive excerpt from the seventeenth–century Anatomy of Melancholy by Robert Burton, who wrote, “The Tower of Babel never yielded such confusion of tongues as this Chaos of Melancholy doth variety of symptoms.” Burton went on to write, “I would advise him, that is actually melancholy, not to read this Tract of Symptomes, lest he disquiet or make himselfe for a time worse, and more melancholy than he was before.” Radden offers a most catholic selection of thinkers, from Galen to Cassian the monk and Teresa of Ávila, up through Kant, Freud, and today’s pharmaceutical managers of depression. Melancholy is most generally understood as feelings of intense sadness or fear without sufficient cause. But, as Radden makes clear, almost each word in that sentence—feelings, sadness, fear, cause—has been subjected to centuries of theorizing and dispute.

A remarkable fact is that contemporary thought about melancholy or depression has come full circle back to the theory of humors. Kant proposed that melancholy, indeed all mental disorder, has its cause in illogic, false belief, or delusion. Almost nobody today is a Kantian on that score. Freud had, as one might expect, fascinating fantasies about loss, narcissistic retrojection, and longing for the mother’s breast, or whatever. And of course he still has his true believers. Others, notably feminist theorists, contend that melancholy is culturally constructed. But after all these centuries, the dominant scientific view is that of the science of Greek antiquity: melancholy is caused by an imbalance of something or the other, call them humors, in the body. The big difference today, of course, is that relentless experimentation has discovered that drugs can somehow or another—nobody quite knows why—affect such imbalances and relieve the symptoms of melancholy, now called depression.

Among the merits of The Nature of Melancholy is its modesty. Implicit in Radden’s presentation is her warning against the simple–minded reductionism of those who, still today, claim scientific authority for their belief that moods, emotions, and mind itself are all to be explained by material causation. The advanced thinkers of Germany in the nineteenth century produced a school of thought known as somatism, which, joined to the multiplying classifications of psychiatry, produced phrenology. Phrenology was proclaimed as an exact science in which the study of the shape of the skull was thought to reveal mental faculties and character. Such pseudo–science, then and now, was explicitly aimed at downgrading or denying the moral, spiritual, and intellectual dimensions of human thought and action.

Aristotle, Galen, Cassian, and other worthies understood that man is both soul and body—an embodied soul or, as some preferred, an ensouled body. The body affects the soul, and the soul affects the body. The first affect depends on what, for lack of a better term, they called the humors. It is not evident that we have a better term today. What we do have is much greater experimental knowledge about the pharmaceutical manipulation of whatever–they–are–to–be–called. That is, for many people, a great blessing. Unless they are seduced into believing, with the materialists of yesterday and today, that such manipulation means that they do not have a soul.

Something Like, Just Maybe, a Catholic Moment

(The twelfth in a series on the idea of “Christian America.”)

There are three main constellations of American Christianity—mainline/oldline Protestantism, evangelical Protestantism, and Roman Catholicism. I turn now to Catholicism, the third force in the confused religio–cultural mix of Christian America. Before he died in 1967, Father John Courtney Murray, who had a key role in the Second Vatican Council’s teaching on religious freedom, speculated that the day was not far off, and perhaps had already come, when Catholics would succeed establishment (read mainline) Protestantism in providing a moral and philosophical rationale for the American experiment in liberal democracy. At the time, most thought that a highly implausible suggestion. But again, history has many ironies in the fire.

Harvard historian John T. McGreevy, writing in the June 1997 issue of the Journal of American History, tracks the curious course of Catholicism from being the perceived enemy of democracy to becoming a candidate for its intellectual rejuvenation. “Thinking on One’s Own: Catholicism in the American Intellectual Imagination, 1928–1960,” to which I have referred before, is a masterful documentation of the pervasiveness of anti–Catholic prejudice among the brightest and best of America’s intellectual class. This was not a prejudice that can be lightly dismissed as bigotry; it was a reasoned prejudice, based upon an apparently plausible logic. In an era when public intellectuals such as John Dewey seemed to reign supreme, it was understood, first, that devotion to democracy is the preeminent American value. The second doctrine was that democracy requires people who are disposed to “thinking on one’s own.” Third, the Catholic Church is the sworn enemy of that disposition. Conclusion: the Catholic Church is the enemy of democracy.

What is most striking from McGreevy’s research is the pervasiveness, the sheer taken–for–grantedness, of the above prejudice. In major research universities, the appointment of a Catholic in fields such as history, political science, or philosophy sparked heated controversies, quite explicitly about whether a Catholic was free to be honest in his teaching and research. Defenders of such appointments argued that candidates were qualified despite their being Catholics, or offered assurances that they were not very serious Catholics. Much in the manner, one might note, that John F. Kennedy was elected after he assured the Baptist ministers of Houston that he was not a very serious Catholic—although, to be sure, not in quite those words. (One notes in passing that, contrary to some tellings of the story, Fr. Murray, far from being party to Kennedy’s statements on religion in the 1960 campaign, was appalled by them.)

As mentioned earlier, the certification of Catholics as Good Americans was bestowed under liberal auspices. In the more than two hundred Catholic colleges and universities in America, older faculty members well remember the bad old days documented by McGreevy. They vehemently resist the current trend toward strengthening the “Catholic identity” of these institutions, fearing a return to what is called an “intellectual ghetto.” Any association with authoritative Catholic teaching is thought to threaten an authoritarianism that would be the death of academic freedom, understood as “thinking on one’s own.”

McGreevy offers a different reading of the current circumstance. The idea of the autonomous individual “thinking on one’s own” is no longer what it was once cracked up to be. “An emphasis on individual rights, in this view, can occur at the expense of the more prosaic politics of compromise and institution building. Some philosophers extend this point to argue that moral traditions mark the beginning of genuine discussion, not simply a roadblock to thinking on one’s own. The cumulative effect of this fascination with intellectual and social ‘community’ changes lingering apprehensions about the threat posed to social cohesion by Catholic schools and churches into admiration.” The impetus toward parental choice and genuine pluralism in education, for instance, has in recent years been largely driven by admiration for the academic and moral achievements of Catholic schools. The philosophical extension of this change is evident in the work of thinkers such as Alasdair MacIntyre on the indispensability of authoritative moral traditions.

I once wrote, a few years before I became a Catholic, a book titled The Catholic Moment: The Paradox of the Church in the Postmodern World. Some, both among those who loved it and those who were less than pleased, mistook it for a “triumphalist” argument that Catholicism now had the upper hand and was more or less in charge of the religio–cultural redirection of the American experiment. The argument, in fact, was and is that Catholicism is uniquely situated to work with other Christian communions, and very specifically with evangelical Protestantism and Judaism, in reconstituting the public culture of that experiment. We have already considered the ways in which Catholics have been deeply ambivalent about the idea of Christian America. Chesterton’s “nation with the soul of a church” runs up against allegiance to a universal Church that was here long before America, and will be here long after the sun has set upon the American Moment in world history.

Six Ages of the Church

This is not to suggest that America is incidental or of little consequence in the self–understanding of the Catholic Church. The Church has had sobering experience, however, with those who propose grandiose schemes about what God is doing in history. Among the more spectacular instances is Joachim of Fiore, a twelfth–century Cistercian monk, who divided all of history into three ages—an age of the Father, an age of the Son, and a dawning age of the Holy Spirit. While Joachim tried always to be orthodox (Dante placed him in his Paradise), the following centuries saw sundry fanaticisms that picked up on Joachim’s grand scheme, turning it to revolutionary purposes that continued into the twentieth century—a story compellingly told by Norman Cohn in The Pursuit of the Millennium. Similarly, American Protestantism has witnessed “dispensationalist” prophets who read the signs of the times with the Bible (notably the books of Daniel and Revelation) in one hand and the daily newspaper in the other, sometimes setting specific dates for the various stages leading to the End Time. It is not only the marginal and eccentric, however, who have made prophetically charged proposals about the meaning of America in world history. In Ernest Tuveson’s Redeemer Nation and other studies, we find ample documentation of the most careful thinkers, both secular and religious, who have been convinced that the discovery and ascendancy of the New World heralds a New Age of cosmic consequence.

A justified skepticism about such intoxicating visions can too easily slide into the jaded conclusion that there is no purpose or sustained narrative to be discerned in history. The course of wisdom for those who believe that God is also the Lord of history is to avoid both cynicism and enthusiasm in trying to discern the unfolding narrative. Within this larger story, one may try to understand the possible meaning of Christian America in God’s purposes. In the 1930s, the great and very sober historian Christopher Dawson was thinking about “the six ages of the Church,” with specific reference to America.

To very briefly summarize, Dawson said there was first the Apostolic Age, which “stands in a sense outside the course of Church history as the archetype of spiritual creativity.” The second age began with the fourth–century conversion of the emperor Constantine, the establishment of Christendom, the theological writings of the great Church Fathers, the doctrinally pivotal decisions of Councils, the flourishing of art, architecture, and letters. The second age came to an end with the loss of the Christian East and the seventh–century conquest of Islam in Syria, Egypt, North Africa, and most of Spain. The third age witnessed a new Christian culture in Europe—“ineptly termed ‘medieval,’” according to Dawson—in which “the relation between religion and culture was closer than in any other period.” Irish and Anglo–Saxon missionaries created a new Christendom of a “Latin ecclesiastical culture” that would be the basis of subsequent civilizations, and found its most ambitious expression in the Carolingian Empire, all of which would finally succumb to the barbarian invasions from the North and East. The fourth age began with the reform movement of the eleventh century that united the papacy and monasteries in resisting the secularization of the Church and its absorption into feudal society. Among the great heroes of that age were Gregory VII, Anselm of Canterbury, Bernard of Clairvaux, and Francis of Assisi. They asserted the independence of the Church and broke with the traditional order to make the papacy an instrument for the evangelization of the masses and international mission.

But the princes, such as Philip IV of France, would in time have their revenge. Secular rulers, with an assist from radical movements of reform such as the Wycliffites and the Hussites, would lead to the Great Schism in the papacy itself, with competing popes, Rome debauched, and the stage set for what is called the Reformation, which separated most of Northern Europe from Catholicism, and thus delivered a large part of Christianity into the custody of the secular authority. The fifth age of the Church, according to Dawson, is the Counter–Reformation or the Tridentine Reform, which witnessed also great missionary expansion in the Far East and the Americas, as well as the highest development of Catholic mysticism and the art, architecture, literature, and devotional practices that go by the name of Baroque. But the Catholic revival that was Baroque culture was short–lived, being too closely tied to Catholic monarchies, and everything was swept away by the French Revolution and allied enemies of the ancien régime. At the start of the nineteenth century, “In the eyes of secular opinion, the Catholic Church had been abolished as a superannuated relic of the dead past.” Then began the sixth age.

“Yet in spite of all these disasters,” Dawson writes, “the Church did recover and the revival of Catholicism took place, so that the Church was in a far stronger position by 1850 than it had been a hundred years before when it still possessed its ancient wealth and privileges.” Key to this recovery is the American experience. “Indeed the whole history of Catholicism in the United States belongs to this sixth age and is in many aspects typical of the new conditions of the period.” Catholicism in America is essentially urban, whereas in Europe it was still mainly rooted in the peasantry, and it is vigorously independent from the state. “At the present day it is the American rather than the European pattern which is becoming the normal condition of the Church everywhere.”

Historians know that there is inevitably an element of the arbitrary in putting vast stretches of history into periods. The real world does not work, things do not happen, in obedience to our chronological schemes. Dawson knew that, as he also knew that the story is far from over. “I have spoken of the Six Ages of the Church—there may be sixty before the universal mission of the Church is completed. But each age has its own peculiar vocation which can never be replaced, and each, to paraphrase [Leopold von] Ranke’s famous saying, stands in a direct relation to God and answers to Him alone for its achievements and its failures. Each, too, bears its own irreplaceable witness to the faith of all.”

Springtime and Springboard

This, then, suggests the world–historical context within which one should think about the part of Catholicism in Christian America. Nor should one think of Catholicism in any exclusive sense, for it is the teaching of the Catholic Church that she is the gravitational center through time of the entire Christian movement. Needless to say, not all Christians agree with that, or, if they do agree, they do not understand it in the same way. The Catholic view is that the story of the Church, which is the reality of Christ through time, is the story of the world, the axis mundi, the center upon which world history turns, and the end toward which it presses. Of course that is a theological proposition that will not be convincing to those who do not accept certain truth claims about Christ and his Church. Dawson’s idea of the importance of the “American pattern” for the future, however, does not depend entirely upon those theological truth claims.

The pontificate of John Paul II has paid closer and more appreciative attention to the American experience than any pontificate since the discovery of the New World. Major teaching initiatives of the pontificate have drawn on the American experience in important ways. I examined in the book Appointment in Rome: The Church in America Awakening the ways in which this American prominence poses problems for Rome. It would not do for the world’s premier spiritual center to be too closely associated with the world’s premier political and economic power. That is why, incidentally, it is most unlikely that there will be a pope from the United States in the twenty–first century. It is also why, when the Pope convened a Synod for America at the end of 1997, “America” was in the singular. A greater consciousness of unity between North, Central, and South America is, he believes, essential to holding the United States accountable to the diversity of the cultural, economic, and political worlds present in the one America. To be held accountable to the countries South of us is to be held accountable to the similar worlds of, for instance, Africa and Asia. At the same time, America is now the demographic center of the universal Church, with about two–thirds of the more than one billion Catholics in the world living in the Western Hemisphere, which includes the countries with the three largest Catholic populations—Brazil, Mexico, and the United States, in that order. (By some counts, the Philippines is neck and neck with the U.S.)

As noted earlier, the two largest and fastest growing sectors of the Christian movement in the world are Catholicism and evangelical Protestantism (the latter including Pentecostalists, who frequently distinguish themselves from evangelicals). In his 1999 post–synod apostolic exhortation, Ecclesia in America, delivered in Mexico City, John Paul II reiterated his belief that the third millennium holds the promise and imperative of a “springtime of world evangelization.” He stressed that the imperative of evangelization must be joined to the imperative of ecumenism, so that, in Latin America and elsewhere, Christians will evangelize with one another rather than against one another. Christians in the United States are uniquely situated for this anticipated springtime of evangelization.

Among evangelical Protestants, it has long been a commonplace, going well back into the nineteenth century, that God has so arranged things that America is to be the springboard of world evangelization. That way of thinking is haunted by memories of the Redeemer Nation, manifest destiny, cultural imperialism, and associated excesses of national hubris. Such excesses are at least tempered, if not precluded, by the understanding of a Christian movement that locates any American Moment within the context of ages past and ages to come, and within a community of faith that is truly universal. Such is the perspective provided, or the perspective that should be provided, by Catholicism, the third major player in our religio–cultural story. To think we know God’s precise purpose for Christian America in world history is presumption. To assume there is no such purpose is a loss of intellectual and spiritual nerve.

While We’re At It

Sources: While We’re At It: On Bush v. Gore, Chronicle of Higher Education, January 2, 2001. Martin E. Marty on Catholics in health care, Context, January 1, 2001. Jonah Goldberg on the devil in movies, National Review Weekend, January 6–7, 2001. Fr. Andrew Greeley on Catholicism in Ireland, Irish Independent, November 28, 2000. Faith–based health care, Religion Watch, January 2001. On missionary activity, International Bulletin of Missionary Research, January 2001. Devout atheists, Burlington Free Press, August 12, 2000. Ralph McInerny on Vatican II, Catholic Dossier, November/December 2000. Caleb Crain on new translation of Democracy in America, New York Times Book Review, January 14, 2001. Eric Michael Mazur on Stephen L. Carter, Society, January/February 2001. David Macey on critical theory, Context, January 15, 2001. David Blankenhorn on marriage, Propositions, Winter 2001. On British debate over cloning, Catholic Herald, January 13, 2001. Hip–hop liturgy, Parade, February 4, 2001. Archbishop Curtiss on vocations, Catholic World Report, February 2001. Protestant identity in “The Intellectual Appeal of the Reformation,” Theology Today, January 2001. Hilton Kramer on Yo Mama’s Last Supper, New York Observer, February 26, 2001. On Holocaust reparations, New York Times, January 17, 2001. Fr. Fred Kammer on faith–based social services, Washington Post, February 10, 2001. Daniel Pipes on the Middle East, Middle East Forum press release, February 14, 2001. Commonweal on Bush tax cut, February 9, 2001. Edward Kessler on Dabru Emet, Tablet, February 3, 2001. University of Texas protest, Daily Texan, February 21, 2001. Rabbi Eric Yoffie on Marc Rich pardon, Wall Street Journal, March 8, 2001; Leon Wieseltier on same, New Republic, March 5, 2001. Jenny Richardson’s First Communion, Boston Pilot, February 2, 2001. Rabbi Jacob Neusner on bread for Communion, personal correspondence. Stanford study on crime and abortion, Quarterly Journal of Economics, May 2001. Marvin Olasky on GKC,World, December 30, 2000. Quackery in Quote . . . Unquote, January 2001. Geoffrey Hill on poetry, Image, Fall 2000.