Christians don’t talk enough about depression. Emotional pain, for one thing, can be hard to share. Despair can feel very physical for the sufferer, weighing heavily on the heart and clogging the brain, but its surface features can be easily overlooked or missing altogether. A depression that . . . . Continue Reading »
The sudden death of Justice Antonin Scalia forces us to reconsider the role that the Constitution plays in our rhetoric and in our imagination. Our constitutional system is more fraught than most of us had dared admit, even as our politics has leaned ever-more-strongly on the Constitution to unify . . . . Continue Reading »
The Monuments Men was a disappointing movie, but one of its most chilling scenes sticks in my mind as an analogue to the appalling wickedness underway in the Middle East. In the film, SS Colonel Wegner supervises the destruction of art works plundered by the Nazis: treasures intended for Hitler’s . . . . Continue Reading »
In this election season of sound bites, bluster, and bombast, more unexpected than the rise of so-called outsider candidates is a junior Senator who is trying to elevate the tone of political discourse. Recently, Benjamin Sasse of Nebraska has been defending the peculiar inefficiency—yes, . . . . Continue Reading »
Like many Ukrainian Greco-Catholics, I am pleased that Pope Francis and Patriarch Kirill finally met in Havana February 12, even though the negotiations that preceded this encounter included some unseemly concessions. After all, for the last three decades such an encounter was always described as . . . . Continue Reading »
For me, the text of the Pope Francis and Patriarch Kirill’s joint declaration came as a surprise, as did their meeting and its location in Havana. This document is significantly better in style and content than any earlier official document or statement from the Russian Orthodox Church. Simply . . . . Continue Reading »
When the American Catholic poet Dunstan Thompson died in 1975, his death went virtually unnoticed. One of the rising literary stars of the 1940’s, his poetry had been practically forgotten, except among a few scholars and devoted readers. Today, Thompson still remains largely unknown, but thanks . . . . Continue Reading »
The history of the Bible turns on fasts broken and kept. As Alexander Schmemann put it, God formed Adam hungry and gave him the world as his banquet. Every tree of the garden, including the tree of life, was on his menu, with only one restriction: Adam was not to eat the fruit from the tree of the . . . . Continue Reading »
There is an old story, much loved by academics, that in an address to the Columbia University faculty in 1948 Dwight Eisenhower, then President of the university, prefaced his remarks with the phrase: “Now, you employees of Columbia University . . .”A member of the faculty interjected to correct . . . . Continue Reading »
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