The editorial in our May 1991 issue was titled “Christian Mission and the Third Millennium.” It described the complicated connections between the Christian missionary enterprise and the future of an essentially Western civilization that is, in however ambiguous a manner, a product of the . . . . Continue Reading »
Year after year we reap new harvests of Civil War literature, despite the admonition of some historians that the subject has been exhausted. We tell and retell the story of the Civil War, hoping through vicarious participation to gain a better sense of our national identity, vocation, and destiny. . . . . Continue Reading »
Papal doctrine on political economy has long been misunderstood as well as mistrusted among those economic liberals who in the United States have the curious habit of calling themselves conservatives. The recent publication of John Paul II’s Centesimus Annus, commemorating as it does the . . . . Continue Reading »
A friend of mine, more radical and pessimistic than I, claims that it is illegal to be a Christian in the United States today. Though I find that assessment overstated, not to say hysterical, it can hardly be doubted that public expressions of Christianity have, in the last several decades, been . . . . Continue Reading »
Recently I was a speaker and panel member at a small educational workshop on “advance directives” sponsored by the ethics committee of our local hospital. The workshop was an opportunity to provide information about, and discuss the relative merits of, living wills and durable powers of attorney . . . . Continue Reading »
Half a century ago, on March 9, 1940, with the world collapsing into a war that was to exceed the worst nightmare, the great German novelist Thomas Mann delivered a brief radio address entitled “The Dangers Democracy.” “The streamlined, artificial anti-Semitism of our technical age,” . . . . Continue Reading »
Strange as it may seem in a country positively flooded with the commodity, we don’t always understand what News is. News is what has happened since yesterday’s paper or broadcast. It is that daily budget of information that a person needs in order to be “informed,” to feel tuned in . . . . Continue Reading »
The history books tell us that Gavrilo Princip, the Serbian nationalist who shot and killed Austrian Archduke Francis Ferdinand in 1914 at Sarajevo, started World War I by providing the occasion, or excuse, for the release of long-smoldering political tensions and ambitions. Thus can small trickles . . . . Continue Reading »
Many of our readers have been intensely and rightly concerned about threatening turns in the Supreme Court’s already monumentally confused rulings on religious freedom. Things came to a head with the April 1990 decision in the case of Employment Division v. Smith, otherwise known as “the . . . . Continue Reading »
When I was a sophomore in high school in Colorado in the late 1950s, I was required, as were all female students, to take a course in “home economics.” The home economics movement had emerged out of a progressivist desire to “scientize” a hitherto amateur activity. The complicated tasks of . . . . Continue Reading »
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