Dan Hitchens is a senior editor at First Things. He is currently co-writing a book about Dr Johnson, and writes The Pineapple Substack.
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To understand Boris Johnson, you have to understand the figure who has inspired him, shaped his worldview and accompanied him throughout his career. Admittedly Samuel Johnson has been dead since 1784, but his importance to Boris is unquestionable. Our next prime minister thinks the other Johnson is a ‘genius’ who ‘gave the world compassionate conservatism’.
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Alabama’s near-total abortion ban, signed into law on Wednesday by governor Kay Ivey, is a real moment of hope. The principle on which it grounds itself is simple enough; as Ivey put it: ‘Every life is precious.’ In those four words lies a remedy for the hatreds that divide humanity. True, pro-lifers have their own doubts over
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Walking down the street on my lunch break, I sometimes pass a delivery man wheeling a large handcart of Japanese food. The cart bears a striking message: ‘Creating a world where everyone believes in their own authenticity.’ It raises some immediate questions: for instance, what does it mean to believe in your own authenticity? How
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‘The world is looking at you,’ the actress Susan Sarandon informed Argentina’s Senate on Tuesday, ahead of its vote on an abortion bill. ‘Give women the right to choose!’ She may have been inspired by Amnesty International, who had taken out a full-page ad in the international New York Times to tell the Senate: ‘THE
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Anti-Christian persecution, for so long a great untold story, has started to gain the world’s attention. But the suffering of Christian communities, from Syria to Nigeria to China, is part of an even broader phenomenon. Religious conflict is on the rise across the globe, with ancient tensions being raised by new political methods. And in
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‘Mayism’, whether it left you in admiration or despair, at least seemed like an identifiable philosophy. It was concerned with social justice, but it wasn’t socialist: it was better described as post-liberal. Mayism was sceptical of free markets, which were prey to ‘selfish individualism’ (as the manifesto put it), but it didn’t see big government
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Donald Trump’s verdict on his audience with Pope Francis – ‘fantastic meeting’, ‘honor of a lifetime’ – may disappoint those who were expecting a showdown. The Pope is supposed to be Trump’s ‘antithesis’, ‘the anti-Trump’, his ‘polar opposite’ and so on and so on. But in the end the meeting was merely awkward, to judge
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With Italy facing a referendum that could unseat its president, the EU’s member states in furious conflict over immigration, and Hillary Clinton looking like an increasingly shaky last line of defence, our very own Brexit is being held up as the model of a new, disruptive politics. But its meaning has been debated. For some, Brexit
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If Christian Britain is fading away, what will survive of it? One answer seems to be pilgrimage. In the past decade, 30 pilgrimage routes have been created or rediscovered; holy places have seen a 14 per cent growth in visitor numbers since 2013. These figures are recorded by a new organisation, the British Pilgrimage Trust,
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The LGBT rights movement — so the story goes — has split the Christian churches in two. On one side are the progressives, who believe that Christianity should accept gay people and recognise gay marriage. Lined up against them are the conservatives, who hold fast to the belief that being gay is sinful. It’s not
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According to the Times, Dan Walker, the new BBC Breakfast presenter, is ‘a creationist’. A ‘senior BBC figure’ is quoted as saying that this ‘nutty’ belief would make life difficult for Walker if, say, he had to present a story about a 75,000-year-old fossil. How could he if he thinks the earth is less than 10,000
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The ‘red card’ on proposed EU legislation has been hailed by David Cameron as a breakthrough; the ‘Stronger In’ campaign have put it at the top of their list of renegotiation successes. But it already pretty much exists. The very similar ‘orange card’ was introduced by the 2009 Lisbon Treaty. (The European Commission’s website explains how it works.) Here’s a
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The Swedish and German authorities say they have never encountered anything like it: groups of men encircling then molesting women in large public gatherings. It happened in Cologne and Stockholm, but is it really unprecedented? Ivar Arpi argues in the new Spectator that it may well be connected to a phenomenon called ‘taharrush gamea’, a form of group harassment
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What’s the objection to the new contract? It applies to all junior doctors – that is, doctors who aren’t consultants and GPs – and would change how they’re paid. The major concern is about ‘unsocial hours’ – weekends and nights. At the moment, junior doctors are paid a basic rate for working between 7am and 7pm Monday
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Are we really, as David Cameron claimed in his Christmas message, a country shaped by ‘Christian values’? Yesterday’s Evening Standard poll – which found that shopping is three times more integral to Britons’ Christmas than going to church – makes you wonder what the phrase even means. It doesn’t just mean do-goodery, though that is important. About 10 million Britons
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Everybody skims over a document at some point: when you’re asked to agree to terms and conditions before accessing wifi, you don’t always look too carefully at the details. But you might hope that the officers of the National Audit Office would be more scrupulous. The NAO – which scrutinises £1 trillion of public spending
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Martin Surl, the Police and Crime Commissioner for Gloucestershire, has been buying flipflops. Hundreds of them. Not for the police, but for a local Christian volunteer team of ‘street pastors’. Earlier this year, Surl announced a £40,000 grant to cover the group’s training and resources. ‘Some things are better delivered by people who aren’t the
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Back in March, the Plymouth Herald was delighted by ‘a Budget with plenty for Plymouth’. As Mark Gettleson noted on Coffee House at the time, Plymouth is a ‘hyper-marginal city’: both its seats are currently held by Tories with small majorities, Oliver Colvile and Johnny Mercer. So the Chancellor’s generosity may not have come out of
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In the run-up to Remembrance Day, my local branch of the Quakers has been displaying a sign on the front door. It reads, with ever-so-slightly combative bold type: ‘Remembering all who have lost their lives in war’. They’re willing to mourn, as long as they don’t have to be patriotic about it. Temperamentally, I’m with
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Transgender men and women have a powerful story to tell. Their experiences are often heartrending: we should be appalled that nearly half of young trans people have attempted suicide. Meanwhile, there is compelling neuroscientific evidence to suggest that male and female can overlap, and that for some people gender dysphoria is no more eradicable from
