Tag: French Revolution
The Reinvention of the Catholic Church
In May 2021, a time when public gatherings in England were strictly limited because of the coronavirus pandemic, the British tabloids were caught off guard by a stealth celebrity wedding in London. Westminster Cathedral—the “mother church” of Roman Catholics in England and Wales—was abruptly closed on a Saturday afternoon. Soon the groom and bride arrived: Prime Minister Boris Johnson and Carrie Symonds, a Catholic and a former Conservative Party press officer with whom he had fathered a child the
America’s Gambling Addiction Is Metastasizing
Gambling has become one of the defining pleasures of our time, the perfect accompaniment to an era of high-risk, rigged economies and a looming sense of collapse. Once there was Las Vegas; now there’s a Las Vegas in every phone.
You can bet on almost anything today. Elections. Literary prizes. If you have a feeling that, say, Lapuan Virkiä is going to beat Porin Pesakarhut in the women’s Superpesis, the top professional pesäpallo league in Finland, you can put
French Secularism Leaves Little Room for Religion
What forces hold a liberal democracy together? What forces can tear a liberal democracy apart? These were some of the questions on my mind as I listened earlier this year to the French education minister, Jean-Michel Blanquer, defend a proposal that had been placed before the nation.
The setting was grand: the French Senate, a chamber as elegant
The Conservative Backlash to Progress
Although the United States was born of a revolution, one common view maintains that the Constitution tamed our rebellious impulse and launched a distinctly nonrevolutionary political experiment. But throughout American history, an important strand of conservatism has repeatedly championed rebellions—or what are better understood as counterrevolutions.
They emerge like clockwork: Each time political minorities advocate for and achieve greater equality, conservatives rebel, trying to force a reinstatement of the status quo.
The term counterrevolution is significant not only because conservatives
François Poulain, Radical-Feminist Forefather – The Atlantic
This article was published online on July 28, 2021.
What if I told you that the first modern feminist was a man, lived in the 17th century, and was a priest? I’m guessing you’d be especially skeptical about the priest part, so I’ll add that when this father of feminism wrote his vindications of women’s rights, he wasn’t a priest yet. He became one later, probably because he was broke.
His name was François Poulain de la Barre (actually,