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The recent (and sadly flawed) movie Bonhoeffer reminds us that Dietrich Bonhoeffer, the German pastor and Lutheran theologian, is rightly revered for his courage in resisting Nazism—a path that...

I spent the evening after November 5 on YouTube. The site was full of time-compressed videos that tracked news media icons and Hollywood celebrities as election night wore on....

I staffed a bishop-delegate in Rome at the 2015 Synod on the Family. Asked, at the time, for possible themes at the next synod, the delegate pressed for (among...

The End of Everything: How Wars Descend into Annihilation by victor davis hanson basic books, 343 pages, $20.95. A few years ago a longtime friend and “bird” (i.e., full-rank)...

The philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre once described humans as “dependent, rational animals,” arguing in his text that, as creatures, we need the virtues. This makes sense, because none of us...

In March 2022, a memorandum entitled “The Vatican Today” appeared and was widely circulated. Sharply critical of the Francis pontificate, it was signed by an anonymous source described as...

Eulogies are curious things. Too many, too often, are long, rambling, weepy, and meaningful only to the relatively few who liked the deceased enough to show up for the...

Laudate Deum (“Praise God”), Pope Francis’s apostolic exhortation on the climate crisis, released in Rome today, has at least one great strength. It’s shorter than Laudato Si’ (“Praised Be”),...

Why is he shouting at us?” It was an innocent question, whispered at Mass in the middle of an agitated Pope Francis homily. My wife had arrived in Rome...

Toward a More Perfect Union: The Moral and Cultural Case for Teaching the Great American Storyby timothy s. goegleinrnfidelis publishing, 208 pages, $26 Simone Weil, the Jewish philosopher and...

Airports harbor interesting stories. Here’s an example. On my way home from a speaking engagement recently, I spent time with a lay friend, a young scholar, while he waited...

Adam and Eve After the Pill, Revisitedby mary eberstadtrnrnforeword by cardinal george pellrnrnignatius, 199 pages, $19.95 Very early in her new book, Mary Eberstadt notes that a new kind...

My father’s idea of a good time was digging a ditch. Like my mother, he’d been born in the first years of the 20th century. His father had been...

Religious Freedom After the Sexual Revolution:A Catholic Guideby helen m. alvarécua press, 256 pages, $24.95 In Jack London’s The Iron Heel and Sinclair Lewis’s It Can’t Happen Here, America’s...

History never repeats itself, but patterns of human thought and behavior repeat themselves all the time. William Faulkner captured it well when he said that “the past is never...