Tag: Ross Douthat

Fertility rates are low. After going through the pregnancy of our first child, I’m surprised they aren’t lower. Many young people lack the “why” to endure the cultural pessimism around childrearing.

To whatever extent I imposed a narrative on experience, it was only because experience first imposed it upon me.

Beneath these critiques of the American medical system and the biological mysteries of the human body throbs a more existential question: How does one deal with suffering? These are some of the most moving parts of Douthat’s book. He finds himself literally prostrate before the altar seeking some meaning in his suffering.

Douthat continues to discover remedies for his condition, but his experience has produced a book in which the natural world confronts us with suffering’s source and signifies the possibility of redemption. The Deep Places elucidates creation’s shadow side, the abyss of suffering that leads us to search for answers to our most profound questions of creation, pain, and evil.

Douthat is, I think, proposing a conversation. As a low-level functionary in the medical-industrial complex, I would like to take him up on that offer. There may be much to learn from sharing our stories. Whether others will join us is more than I can promise.

The left is collectivizing, the right falling apart. Can a pragmatic, humanist center hold?

It’s true that we don’t yet have a colony on Mars. But countless people are living very ordinary lives and doing very ordinary things that are true, good, and beautiful.

Martin Scorsese’s film adaptation of Silence (2016), the 1966 novel by Shusako Endo, follows the trials of a young Portuguese Jesuit, Father Rodrigues, whose...

Hidden Springs, VA. Recently Ross Douthat commented on Rod Dreher’s new book in a column devoted to the rising incidence of suicide and the...