On the Square Today

George Weigel on Pugin at 200 :

The prospect of “redecorating,” or any other form of “home improvement,” generally gets me thinking, quickly, about a lengthy research trip abroad. Yet I can, and recently did, spend several pleasant hours contemplating ceramics, furniture, and—would you believe it?—wallpaper. But not at Home Depot, I quickly add; rather, in a book— Pugin: A Gothic Passion , published in 1994 by Yale University Press in association with London’s Victoria and Albert Museum.

Also today, Stephanos Bibas on Chuck Colson’s enduring legacy :

When Chuck Colson passed away this month, obituaries naturally remembered him first and foremost as the White House counsel brought down by his role in Watergate’s dirty tricks. But his evangelical conversion to Christ turned him into an inspired prison reformer, belying F. Scott Fitzgerald’s dictum that “there are no second acts in American lives.” He was the most significant, and certainly the most unusual, prison reformer of the past century. Colson’s Prison Fellowship Ministries, and his broader legacy of penal reform, will live on, though the burden now falls to the living to complete his unfinished business.