Nicholas Frankovich

The stained-glass chancel windows at St. Paul’s Chapel on the Columbia campus form a triptych in which the Apostle Paul is shown preaching to a small crowd on the Areopagus. You know the episode in the Acts of the Apostles. In Jerusalem, Paul met with vehement protest, but in Athens . . . . Continue Reading »

Avery Cardinal Dulles was a lean man who wrote lean prose. That he was never prolix makes it all the more remarkable that he was so prolific. Of the millions of words he published in his long, productive career, perhaps the most quoted are the handful that make up a certain passage from A . . . . Continue Reading »

By now you have either seen or heard about the cover of the latest issue of the New Yorker . Barack Obama is depicted in Middle Eastern dress, and his wife Michelle carries an automatic rifle. From all quarters, including the Obama campaign, objections that the whole thing is scurrilous have been . . . . Continue Reading »

Last month I posted here some thoughts about abortion rights and the right to die. At Mirror of Justice, Rick Garnett offered a few tough-minded comments and has persuaded me that the equation between abortion and suicide may be too involved for anyone to depict it, as I tried to do, in broad . . . . Continue Reading »

Hawks and social conservatives in the United States find themselves in a delicate coalition that will either solidify or disperse. Can it survive Giuliani and his campaign for the Republican nomination for president? He says he’s against terrorism and abortion and would fight the former but . . . . Continue Reading »

Summorum Pontificum , the motu proprio whereby the pope grants a universal indult for the celebration of Mass according to the 1962 missal, was promulgated on Saturday in Latin without, at least yet, being accompanied by official translations into modern languages. That fact, like the very . . . . Continue Reading »

On April 15, 1947, Jackie Robinson became the first black man to play major-league baseball, as the Dodgers beat the Boston Braves 5-3 over in Brooklyn. The sixtieth anniversary of that event was a little over a week ago, when fitting commemorations were held in ballparks across the continent.We . . . . Continue Reading »

The Passion account read at Mass on Palm Sunday this year was taken from the Gospel of Luke: "The men who held Jesus in custody were ridiculing and beating him. They blindfolded him and questioned him, saying, ‘Prophesy! Who is it that struck you?’ And they reviled him in saying . . . . Continue Reading »