Every young writer, I imagine, has their first intellectual magazine, whose essays and articles are devoured all the more greedily for being slightly over one's head. Mine was First Things.

Even secular people can't really escape from the need to rest their ideas on some belief, some sort of commitment that is not scientific commitment.

One of the things I try to do is take seriously some of the forms of American religion that people consider to be shallow and try and figure out why they have such a strong appeal and tease out the theology they actually represent.

Every young writer, I imagine, has their first intellectual magazine, whose essays and articles are devoured all the more greedily for being slightly over one's head. Mine was First Things.

It's just silly to look at the incredibly steep decline in the mainline and the clear institutional weakening of Catholicism in the 1960s and 70s and pretend that something really big didn't change then. It did change. There really was a significant institutional decline.

If you're willing to recognize the religious element in one secular ideology, you need to be able to recognize it in your own.

Our culture has few taboos that can't be violated, and our establishment has largely given up on setting standards in the first place. Except where Islam is concerned. There, the standards are established under threat of violence, and accepted out of a mix of self-preservation and self-loathing. This is what decadence looks like: a frantic coarseness that "bravely" trashes its own values and traditions, and then knuckles under swiftly to totalitarianism and brute force.