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Whence Comes the Special Resistance to Christ? A Meditation on a Teaching from Joseph Sobran Msgr. Charles Pope • November 23, 2015 • I have started reading through a recently published book called Subtracting Christianity: Essays on American Culture and Society. It is an anthology of the writings of Joseph Sobran (1946-2010), long-time editor at National Review and a keen observer of culture and its intersection with faith. I recommend it highly, for its penetrating observations and its sober portrait of what happens when we remove Christianity from our culture, the same Christianity that was fundamental in our making.I'd like...

It was Sobran’s pathological hatred of Israel that led to his and William F. Buckley’s parting of the ways at National Review in the 1980s. As the NY Times obituary about him summed it up: “Mr. Sobran’s isolationist views on American foreign policy and Israel became increasingly extreme. He took a skeptical line on the Holocaust and said the Sept. 11 terror attacks were a result of American foreign policy in the Middle East, which he believed that a Jewish lobby directed.”

    NOT YOUR AVERAGE JOEby Ann CoulterOctober 6, 2010My friend Joe Sobran died last Thursday, and the world lost its greatest writer. To my delight, some obituaries noted that he had influenced my writing style. I only wish I had known he was so close to the end so I could have seen him again to let him influence me some more. The G.K. Chesterton of our time, Joe could deliver a knockout punch with a single line. Many of his aphorisms were so catchy that everyone repeats them now without realizing their provenance. It was Joe who came...

The love-hate relationship between the late William F. Buckley, and his friend and former employee, the recently deceased Joseph Sobran, is such a fascinating story that it can make up the subject of a book or movie. It is comparable to the legendary friendship between the 18th Century British literary figure, Samuel Johnson, and his biographer, James Boswell. The Buckley/Sobran relationship was a story I followed closely since the mid 1980s, when Sobran caused controversy by publishing anti-Israel polemics, which caused Buckley deep embarrassment. The relation between the two men is well documented in William F. Buckely's biography written by...

...Sobran’s diagnosis of the domestic malaise started with the notion that “the regime we live under” derives its legitimacy from a blatant distortion of the United States Constitution. On the basis of a compact among the sovereign states, the federal government was to be a service confined to the specific enumerated powers the people delegated to it, pursuant to their general welfare and common defense. Over the past century and a half, however, the federal government has usurped all kinds of powers neither the people nor the states had delegated to it. It has become a “consolidated” or centralized government....

Our former NR colleague, Joe Sobran, passed away today after a long battle with a variety of ailments. He was relatively young, just 64, and while physically beaten at the end, he also departed spiritually triumphant.   Surely, in short order, there will be ample reflection — much of it critical — on the hyper-talented, hyper-controversial writer. There will be a recounting of his history at NR, the break, the following years, and Joe’s soured relationship with WFB (happily, they rekindled their friendship before Bill passed away). Good, let’s discuss all that, and more. But later. Right now, let us,...

Joe Sobran's impending death was made known by Dr. David Allen White. Dr. White was a frequent guest lecturer at Bishop Williamson's St. Thomas Aquinas Seminary and is an endorser of John Sharpe's Neo-Conned series. Yesterday, Dr. White sent a public note to the Catholic Family News concerning Joe Sobran's ill health. White made a heartfelt appeal for prayers for Sobran. In addition to this, White wrote: "We thanked him for his good work over the years, especially for being a truth-teller about you-know-whom and for having suffered for it. We then prayed the rosary together. (Emphasis Supplied.)"

Robert R. Reilly’s The Closing of the Muslim Mind: How Intellectual Suicide Created the Modern Islamist (ISI Books, May 2010) will, I am sure, fascinate other readers as it did me. I could hardly put it down until I’d read it twice. Reilly (a dear friend of mine, by the way) contends that Islam suffers from a flawed metaphysic that deforms its theology. It rejects reason and exalts will. It has no room for natural law: Murder is not wrong by definition but only because Allah chooses to forbid it. If he’d decided to enjoin it, it would have become...

[Why the world hates good people.] One sin you don’t hear much about is envy: the hatred of the good for being good. Yet it’s one of the most basic human temptations, making its first recorded appearance near the beginning of the book of Genesis, when Cain hates — and kills — his brother Abel for being favored by the Lord. This kind of envy is not to be confused with coveting another’s possessions. Mere jealousy of wealth can be assuaged by acquiring wealth. But envy arises from the humiliation of moral inferiority. It makes you want to denigrate or...

VIRGINIA BEACH, VA—In his tremendous novel War and Peace, Leo Tolstoy observes that some men “choose their opinions like their clothes—according to fashion.” He adds that no matter how derivative their views are, such men may hold those views with all the passion of partisans. How true. I don’t know how many times I’ve heard people parrot clichés as if they were voicing their own hard-won, independent convictions. In college, I had more than one professor whose political ideas seemed to have been culled from the bumper stickers in an academic parking lot. (They weren’t grateful when I pointed...

During the so-called presidential debates, I failed to hear a single mention of the U.S. Constitution, which should have been the chief subject. What are the proper powers of government, of the federal government, and of the president? These questions don’t even come up anymore. The debaters wrangle heatedly about “the economy”—a phrase that never appears in the text of the Constitution but preoccupies today’s pundits and politicians. Neither of the major-party presidential candidates, let alone President Bush, could have held an intelligent conversation with Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, or John Jay, the authors of The Federalist, our best known...

The Hive (Reprinted from SOBRAN’S, June 1999, page 3) Twenty years ago, I was struck by the way various sorts of political “progressives” — Communists, socialists, liberals, “civil libertarians,” “moderates,” “pragmatists” — all spontaneously cooperated with each other. It wasn’t a conspiracy; there was obviously no central direction. But the pattern was too clear to be denied. The word “left” was a dead metaphor; it said nothing interesting about the people it referred to. So I used the metaphor of an insect hive, which captured the way such people moved in harmony and communicated with each other. In a beehive,...

The Honor of Ron Paul by Joe Sobran "He may have become at last what he has always deserved to be: the most respected member of the U.S. Congress. He is also the only Republican candidate for president who is truly what all the others pretend to be, namely, a conservative. His career shows that a patriotic, pacific conservatism isn’t a paradox."

The Lesser Evil by Joseph Sobran Once, before appearing on a TV talk show, I was told I must not advocate the violent overthrow of the U.S. Government. I hadn’t actually been planning to foment revolution, but this warning gave me an idea: "May I advocate the violent restoration of the Constitution?" I got no answer. Some people think I’m a "purist," or even a "fundamentalist," for harping on the Constitution. Actually, it’s just the opposite. I’m willing to settle for the Constitution as a tolerable compromise. Really principled people, such as Lysander Spooner, the late, great Murray Rothbard, and ...

Obsessed With Jews By Jason Maoz He’s the columnist who complained that "Hitler died in 1945, but anti-Hitler hysteria is still going strong"; cautioned against "the excessive moral prestige Jews have in the media and the public square"; whined about "Jews deciding the standards, setting the criteria of humanity"; and observed, in chilling if artful prose, that because Jews "set themselves up as the arbiter, there is, if you’ll pardon the expression, a certain ‘kill the umpire’ impulse." He’s the writer who decried, in a column following the release of "Schindler’s List," what he called "all this Holocaust-harping" and characterized...

For the first time in living memory, Americans have to think about defense. Most of us (I include myself, until fairly recently) have assumed that our government was defending us. We equated military spending in staggering sums — sustaining heavily armed soldiers, sailors, and pilots around the world — with defense. And we thought that meant safety. It didn’t. Now we know better. All that military spending was making us enemies all over the earth. As a result, we have to worry about people who were no threat to us a few years ago — cruel, cunning men who have ...

We are being assured that Judge Samuel Alito, like John Roberts, and in contrast to poor Harriet Miers, is superbly qualified for the U.S. Supreme Court. He sounds good to me, but I wonder. Specifically, I wonder what "qualified" means. The people who insisted that Miers didn't measure up almost made me wonder what "up" means. Interpreting the U.S. Constitution shouldn't be all that difficult. It's written in plain English for ordinarily intelligent people. The only hard part is ridding your mind of all the false interpretations that have confused people about it. If you search it for something about...

A leading abortion advocate, Kate Michelman, says that if it had been up to Judge Samuel Alito, she might not have been allowed, many years ago, to have the baby she was carrying killed. As you may know by now, Alito once ruled in favor of a law requiring that a married woman get her husband's consent before aborting. For Ms. Michelman, this ruling brings both bad memories and dark forebodings. At the time of her abortion, she recalls, her husband had abandoned her, leaving her with two other children; even so, she says it was a "painful" decision. It...

How can the United States defend itself in the future? Some learned minds are wrestling with this question as new forms of conflict take shape. In the past wars were fought on battlefields the way football is played in stadiums. International law worked out rules of engagement to which most governments subscribed most of the time. "Alas," writes former undersecretary of defense Fred Ikle in the WALL STREET JOURNAL, "America's future enemies may not fight according to these Marquess of Queensbury rules." Mr. Ikle foresees the use of nuclear, chemical, and biological warfare "in that unanticipated region of warfare --...

Back in the 1930s, when white men were preparing for another round of mutual slaughter, few of them paid any attention to the Muslim world. They assumed it to be a backward region that history had long since passed by. One man saw it differently. The great Catholic polemicist Hilaire Belloc, an Englishman of French ancestry, remembered Islam’s past and predicted, in his book The Great Heresies, that it would one day challenge the West again. As late as 1683 its armies had threatened to conquer Europe, penetrating all the way to Vienna; Belloc believed that a great Islamic ...