{"id":111,"date":"2010-11-12T10:23:41","date_gmt":"2010-11-12T10:23:41","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.beliefnet.com\/religionandpubliclife\/2010\/11\/catholic-intellectual-scuttlebutt.html"},"modified":"2010-11-12T10:23:41","modified_gmt":"2010-11-12T10:23:41","slug":"catholic-intellectual-scuttlebutt","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/2010\/11\/catholic-intellectual-scuttlebutt.html","title":{"rendered":"Catholic intellectual scuttlebutt"},"content":{"rendered":"

I was up at Boston College yesterday for an “author meets critics” session on Damon Linker’s provocative new book, The Religious Test<\/i><\/a>, hosted by the Boisi Center. The other critic was Patrick Deneen<\/a> of Georgetown, and the pregame chatter was about Jody Bottum’s summary dismissal<\/a> as editor of First Things<\/i><\/a>, for reasons that allegedly had to do with lavish spending. Linker left as editor four years ago after discovering a dark side<\/a> to founder Richard John Neuhaus, since whose death in early 2009 the magazine has struggled to find a new footing.<\/p>\n

The departure of Fr. Neuhaus from the scene may turn out to have signaled the eclipse of the conservative American Catholic intellectuals of the John Paul II era. Take George Weigel…please. If JPII’s American Boswell is (as reported) persona non grata in the Vatican, it’s at least in part because the curiales<\/i> are busy throwing the former pontiff under the bus.<\/p>\n

So who are Rome’s current intellectual faves? The consensus in Chestnut Hill was that there aren’t any. Maybe that’s because there are now cardinals and archbishops to do what the scribblers used to. I mean, who needs a Neuhaus and a Weigel when you’ve got a Burke and a Chaput?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I was up at Boston College yesterday for an “author meets critics” session on Damon Linker’s provocative new book, The Religious Test, hosted by the Boisi Center. The other critic was Patrick Deneen of Georgetown, and the pregame chatter was about Jody Bottum’s summary dismissal as editor of First Things, for reasons that allegedly had…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":222,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-111","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry"],"yoast_head":"\nCatholic intellectual scuttlebutt - Religion & Public Life With Mark Silk<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/2010\/11\/catholic-intellectual-scuttlebutt.html\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Catholic intellectual scuttlebutt - Religion & Public Life With Mark Silk\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"I was up at Boston College yesterday for an “author meets critics” session on Damon Linker’s provocative new book, The Religious Test, hosted by the Boisi Center. 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After teaching at Harvard in the Department of History and Literature for three years, he became editor of the Boston Review. In 1987 he joined the staff of the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, where he worked variously as a reporter, editorial writer and columnist. In 1996 he became the founding director of the Leonard E. Greenberg Center for the Study of Religion in Public Life at Trinity College and in 1998 founding editor of Religion in the News, a magazine published by the Center that examines how the news media handle religious subject matter. In 2005, he was named director of the Trinity College Program on Public Values, comprising both the Greenberg Center and a new Institute for the Study of Secularism in Society and Culture directed by Barry Kosmin. In 2007, he became Professor of Religion in Public Life at the College. Professor Silk is the author of Spiritual Politics: Religion and America Since World War II and Unsecular Media: Making News of Religion in America. He is co-editor of Religion by Region, an eight-volume series on religion and public life in the United States, and co-author of The American Establishment, Making Capitalism Work, and One Nation Divisible: How Regional Religious Differences Shape American Politics. In 2007 he inaugurated Spiritual Politics, a blog on religion and American political culture.","url":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/author\/msilk"}]}},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/111","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/222"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=111"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/111\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=111"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=111"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=111"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}