Vatican watchers in Italy are getting into a fever about the new economic encyclical by Benedict XVI, due out in a month or so.
The same thing happened almost twenty years ago, in 1991, just before John Paul II issued his much-proclaimed economic encyclical "100th Year" (Centesimus Annus). Then, too, the beehive of the European left was feverishly abuzz, fantasizing in print that the pope would shortly move to the left of Willi Brandt, Neil Kinnock, and all the other famous leaders of the Europe

This spring I was out of the country for a week. Attending Mass shortly after my return, I went forward to receive the Eucharist and opened my mouth in the traditional way. But I received, instead of Jesus, a frown, a shake of the head, and silence. Distressed, I opened my hands questioningly, and the priest pressed the Host into my palm. Back in my pew I watched as this small drama was reenacted with other communicants. Afterward, on a back table I found a letter from our archbishop, outlining

What exactly is in Benedict XVI’s new encyclical on the economy and labor issues is not yet known. Catholic leftists and progressives, though, are already trembling with excitement. Three glaring errors have already appeared in these heavily panting anticipations.
An accurate presentation of real existing capitalism requires at least three modest affirmations:
1) Markets work well only within a system of law, and only according to well-marked-out rules of the game; unregulated markets are a fi

Contrary to what we hear incessantly, marriage is not a right; it is an estate, a condition. There are conditions of life that have nothing to do with rights. One doesn’t have a right to go through puberty. One either does or doesn’t. What is the condition of being married, and what makes it possible to attain it? Franz Rosenzweig’s anthropology—in which religion is a response to man’s sentience of death, and the sentience of death is not only an individual but also an communal charact

Heresy is easy to scrounge up. All one needs is the Bible. I mean just the Bible. And that is exactly how Slate editor David Plotz cooked up a carefree pot of blasphemies in his recent book Good Book: The Bizarre, Hilarious, Disturbing, Marvelous, and Inspiring Things I Learned When I Read Every Word of the Bible.
While bored during his cousin’s bat mitzvah, Plotz—“a proud Jew, but never a very observant one”—unsuspectingly picked up the Bible on the pew in front of him and started rea

In his Poetics, Aristotle observed that some works of art have a paradoxical effect. They represent things that make us cringe and recoil: Orestes kills Clytemnestra; Medea murders her children. Yet, even as we shrink from the brutality and avert our eyes in horror, we are nonetheless strangely attracted to and sometimes ravished by the scenes. What is ugly and brutal can exercise an aesthetic power as great as—perhaps even greater than—beauty itself.
A special centenary exhibition of the wo

My youngest child is now twelve. I was fifty when she was born, a child of my second marriage. There are six preceding her ranging in age from forty-six down to the twelve-year-old. The forty-six year-old was one of the unaccompanied minors out of Vietnam in 1975; that puts me at twenty-eight with an eleven-year-old who didn't speak any English other than "hello" and "no sweat." The youngest still at home, as I best recall, was born talking in complete sentences, a vocabulary replete with "I wan

It is news to no one that, in the Western world in general and the United States in particular, the call to fatherhood is being heeded less and less. Anyone unfortunate enough to pick up a newspaper is painfully aware that one-third of American children live without any father and that, in many inner cities, the out-of-wedlock birth rate exceeds seventy percent. Also well known, though rarely acknowledged, is the devastation that such a lack of paternity has wreaked on children and society more

I don’t know how you feel about Newt Gingrich, but every time he is on, I’m drawn to watch him. He always has a different angle, always has something substantive to say. And that, more than anything else, explains why, with all of the turmoil and embarrassments in his personal life, a party filled with conservative people still want to hear him.
It was no small tribute to him then that even out of office he was selected to give the keynote address on June 9 to the major fund-raising dinner f

I’ll admit it up front. I was disappointed with Home, Marilynne Robinson’s latest novel. There are some finely spun sentences and evocative passages. The final pages breathe with emotional reality, and Robinson’s rich knowledge of Christian theology produces some rewarding insights. But the novel as a whole is workmanlike.
High expectations undoubtedly contributed to my disappointment. Robinson’s first novel, Housekeeping, has an aching beauty. The story focuses on Ruth and Lucille, two