Latest Articles

review of Avatar

April 22, 2010  •  National Review Online

James Cameron's record-shattering film Avatar is being released on DVD today. Today is not a Tuesday, the day DVDs normally hit the stores, but a Thursday, to coincide with the 40th annual Earth Day: Avatar highlights the threats posed by an advanced, war-mongering, and artificial society to a primitive, pacific, and organic culture.

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review of Between Athens and Jerusalem: Philosophy, Prophecy, and Politics in Leo Strauss's Early Thought

April 8, 2010  •  First Things

In a 1932 letter Leo Strauss wrote, "I cannot believe and . . . therefore I search for a possibility to live without faith." That search, which began in the 1920s, led him from contemporary theological debates and the modern liberal critique of religion to medieval Jewish and Islamic thinkers and back to Plato and Socrates, from whom Strauss learned that "raising the question regarding the right way of life—this alone is the right way of life."

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Ralph McInerny (1929-2010)

April 2010  •  First Things

According to Aristotle, is the performance of virtuous acts with ease and delight. On that basis, as well as others, Ralph McInerny was a remarkably virtuous man. One of Ralph's most beautiful books is entitled The Very Rich Hours of Jacques Maritain: A Spiritual Life, the premise of which is that "we can find in the person of Jacques Maritain a model of the intellectual life in the pursuit of sanctity." Those words certainly apply to Ralph, one of the great Catholic intellectuals of our time. What distinguished Ralph was not just his fidelity, his intelligence, and his astonishing productivity, but his gracious and ready wit. He possessed a knack for conversation with everyone—from philosophers and politicians to the elderly and children. Unlike most gifted individuals, Ralph was never burdened by his gifts. He engaged in serious pursuits joyfully, almost playfully.

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Oscar's Parochial World

March 8, 2010  •  First Things

In a scene in the Oscar-nominated film An Education, an older British man with designs on a precocious teenage girl concocts a story for her parents about how he is taking her to visit his old professor, C.S. Lewis. Although Lewis does not figure further in the film, this is a pivotal moment. The thrilled parents grant their permission, and their starry-eyed daughter, who dreams of attending Oxford and experiencing a life of fashionable high culture, becomes further enmeshed in the deceptive world of her superficially cultured suitor. The film does a decent, if predictable, job of showing the way bright, eager young souls can confuse sham culture with real education. The film has absolutely nothing to say, however, about what might constitute a true education.

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Children of Lesser Gods

March 3, 2010  •  First Things

Woody Allen's Whatever Works, a serious contender for worst movie of 2009, is noteworthy mostly as a disastrous attempt to channel Allen's humor through the caustic verbiage of the increasingly unfunny Larry David. But the problem is deeper than casting. In Whatever Works, David plays the New Yorker Boris Yellnikoff, a once-famous scientist who inexplicably ends up taking in a young homeless woman, Melody St. Ann Celestine (Evan Rachel Wood), a former beauty-pageant queen from Mississippi who embodies every caricature of the God-fearing, gun-loving South. Replete with Yellnikoff's screeds against the South and its religiosity, the film sees New York as the place of cosmic enlightenment for backward outsiders. The film also shows how ill-suited David is to anything beyond an extended skit and how astonishingly in decline are the artistic powers of Woody Allen. It is as if Allen set out to make a film that would fulfill the religious right's worst allegations about Hollywood. Exceptional only for its poor quality, Whatever Works is among a group of recent films that embody the shallow critique of theology pervasive among the so-called new atheists.

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Books by Thomas Hibbs