George Weigel

According to a bit of street wisdom that has worked its way into the national vocabulary, “You got to walk the walk, not just talk the talk.” But since the opposite of everything is frequently, if not always, true, we might, on the matter of explicitly Christian rhetoric and the American public . . . . Continue Reading »

God’s Politician: Pope John Paul II, the Catholic Church, and the New World Order by david willey st. martin’s, 258 pages, $18.95 Fifteen years ago, as the long pontificate of Paul VI drew to a close, a consensus on the qualifications for the next pope began to take shape among liberal Catholic . . . . Continue Reading »

Moral theologians have long disputed the point at which a child reaches the “age of reason.” But surely, in these United States, the answer is clear: one reaches the “age of reason” when one can read the box scores (the baseball box scores, of course) in the morning paper. For to grasp the . . . . Continue Reading »

Many great novelists have had intricate, even prickly, personalities. But in Evelyn Waugh, nature and grace worked overtime to produce an extraordinary character, a full understanding of whose complexities would require the combined skills of an archaeologist, a psychiatrist, and a Jesuit confessor . . . . Continue Reading »

Over the past decade, Father Thomas J. Reese, S.J., a fellow of the Woodstock Theological Center in Washington, has become perhaps the most dogged, and certainly the most prolific, Catholic bishop-watcher in the United States. Collecting and retailing stories about bishops has a long history, of . . . . Continue Reading »

Anyone eager for an inside and in-depth exploration of the New Russian Revolution of August 1991 can thank a watchful Providence that James H. Billington, the Librarian of Congress and America’s foremost historian of Russian culture, just happened to be in Moscow on library business when . . . . Continue Reading »

Toward the end of this collection of essays, Professor Iván Völgyes gently chastises his brethren in the history and political science confraternities for the fact that “all too frequently … many of us in our profession … made compromises with the Communist regimes” of the old . . . . Continue Reading »

The year 1991 marked the centenary of modern Catholic social teaching—the issuing of the encyclical Rerum Novarum by Pope Leo XIII—and the bicentenary of the Bill of Rights to the United States Constitution. It might have come as something of a shock to the (very Protestant) . . . . Continue Reading »

On July 6,1991, the Italian Jesuit biweekly, La Civilta Cattolica, published a lengthy editorial arguing that the just war tradition should no longer be considered normative in Catholic thinking about the ethics of war and peace. Those familiar with the ideological peregrinations of many members of . . . . Continue Reading »

About the public debate preceding Operation Desert Storm, two things may be said with some confidence. First, there has rarely been such a sustained (and in many respects impressive) public grappling with the moral criteria and political logic of the just war tradition. Administration officials, . . . . Continue Reading »