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The Lessons of Fr. Paul Mankowski

Mary Eberstadt

Paul Mankowski, S.J., who died unexpectedly four years ago this past fall, was the kind of priest who seemed to spring from pages of the best Catholic fiction—a larger-than-life...

Why Catholics Voted for Trump

Mary Eberstadt

As Democrats and others assess the fallout from last week’s red bombshell, they’re looking at surprises in the exit polls. Here’s one that shouldn’t be missed: The nation’s Catholic...

The Boys in the Bandwidth

Mary Eberstadt

Red and blue Americans are locked in a hostile custody battle right now. But if they agree on anything, it’s that “the gender gap has never been wider,” as...

The Baby Bust Isn’t Just Political, It’s Personal

Mary Eberstadt

In a 2021 interview on the Tucker Carlson show, vice-presidential nominee JD Vance said that “we’re effectively run in this country, via the Democrats . . . by a...

Catholics Against Anti-Semitism

Mary Eberstadt

On October 7, the terrorist organization Hamas decided to follow the Nazi playbook once more. As one observer of World War II put it, the Nazis “ripped the lid...

1968 Is So Over

Mary Eberstadt

In 1883, speaking not as a novelist but as a bystander describing a terrible scene of carnage, Leo Tolstoy observed of what he documented: “We cannot pretend that we...

Men Are at War with God

Mary Eberstadt

Solzhenitsyn famously defined the principal trait of the twentieth century in four words: “Men have forgotten God.” So far, the twenty-first century might be summarized in six: Men are...

A Tale of Two Pregnancies

Mary Eberstadt

Most people who believe abortion to be wrong believe it to be wrong intrinsically. By contrast, those who do not believe abortion to be wrong make a utilitarian deduction:...

Six Rules for Pro-Life Radicals

Mary Eberstadt

This essay is adapted from a speech delivered January 25, 2020, at the first annual meeting of The David Project, a new pro-life organization whose members represent every Ivy...

Goodbye to “So What?”

Mary Eberstadt

The case for American nationalism is clear. The United States is the most diverse nation on earth. If we will not have a nation and its constitution, then we...

The Prophetic Power of Humanae Vitae

Mary Eberstadt

One recurring theme in Pope Francis’s teaching is that human realities trump scholarly abstractions: “La realidad es superior a la idea.” His signature phrase about pastors who have the...

The Zealous Faith of Secularism

Mary Eberstadt

Begin with a sobering fact. During the past ten years, some of the sharpest observers of our time have come to believe that the tectonic plates underlying Western civilization...

Michael Novak by the Sea

Mary Eberstadt

Once upon a time there was a lion . . . and the lion had a voice like a lamb. The day Michael Novak died, that unbidden couplet mysteriously...

The New Intolerance

Mary Eberstadt

In November, Cardinal Walter Kasper gave a speech at the Catholic University of America in which he said, “Mercy has become the theme of [Pope Francis’s] pontificate. . ....

Revolving Revolutions

Mary Eberstadt

The mariners of the sixteenth century could not have imagined that people would ever cross the ocean in anything but a ship. Not only technological facts but also moral...