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Retrospect on a Pontificate

George Weigel

During the March 2013 interregnum following the abdication of Pope Benedict XVI, and in the conclave itself, proponents of Cardinal Jorge Mario Bergoglio, S.J., as Benedict’s successor described him...

Francis, Pope of Ambiguity

Joseph Shaw

One of the constants of the Franciscan pontificate was the favor with which he was treated by the secular English-speaking media. Alongside the tributes that international diplomacy requires, we...

The World’s Spiritual Director

Raymond J. de Souza

Pope Francis died early Easter Monday, less than twelve hours after the last evening Masses had been offered in Roman parishes. On Easter Sunday evening, the assigned Gospel passage...

Pope Francis, My Worst Protestant Nightmare

Carl R. Trueman

The era of Francis is over, and it is time to start the postmortems on his tenure. Throughout his time as pope, Roman Catholic critics of Francis typically prefaced...

Defending Faith and Parental Rights in the Classroom

Grace Morrison

My daughter’s life has been marked by challenges that few her age can begin to fathom. Before we welcomed her into our family, she was an infant in Ukraine...

The Jesuit Pope

R. R. Reno

A remarkable man has passed from the scene. The Society of Jesus got its start nearly five hundred years ago and soon grew to become the most influential (and...

The Church After Francis

Charles J. Chaput

I have personal memories of Pope Francis that I greatly value: a friendly and generous working relationship at the 1997 Synod on America when we were both newly appointed...

Who Died on the Cross?

Peter J. Leithart

Who hangs on the center tree at the Place of the Skull? That’s the question of Good Friday, the conundrum of the cross. It’s also the scandal of Jesus’s...

Today Your Heart Becomes Mount Sinai

Hans Boersma

The Christian faith is bathed in blood. There is no sugarcoating this. Holy Week takes us up to Golgotha. And on Golgotha is a bloody sacrifice—a human sacrifice, no...

Are the Tech Bros Worse than Queer Theorists?

Carl R. Trueman

Last week, two signs of our times passed across my desk. First, a colleague drew my attention to the forthcoming volume A Queer Lectionary: (Im)proper Readings from the Margins—Year...

Vindicating John’s Gospel

Charlotte Allen

In March, a team of archaeologists excavating beneath Jerusalem’s Church of the Holy Sepulcher announced a new finding: ancient pollen and other botanical evidence indicating a garden had been...

How Catholic Institutions Are Responding to the Physician Deficit

Teresa A. Donovan

Last year, the Association of American Medical Colleges warned that the United States will face a shortage of up to 86,000 physicians by 2036, including a shortage of between...

On the Way of the Cross, in Ukraine and Hong Kong

George Weigel

Last Christmas, I borrowed a thought from the English spiritual writer Caryll Houselander and suggested in this space that the wood of the manger anticipates the wood of the Cross: that...

One Cheer for Anna Paulina Luna’s Proxy Voting Gambit

Rachel Bovard

Congressional proxy voting is a terrible idea. It is patently unconstitutional. It is as slippery a slope toward corruption and abuse of power as can be imagined. And even...

Is the Foreigner My Neighbor? A Christian Dialogue on Immigration

James Orr Joel Looper

My wife, an immigration attorney here in Texas, held a well-attended “know your rights” session for immigrants last night. But not a soul who was at risk of deportation came...