Various

Thank you for printing my friend Fr. Blake Johnson’s excellent piece on women’s ordination (“Mere Priestesses,” May 2024). Although some have misread C. S. Lewis and likely will misread Fr. Johnson as accusing women priests of being sexual deviants, the problem has nothing to do with the act . . . . Continue Reading »

Is the Second Vatican Council receding in the church’s rearview mirror? Has the Francis pontificate raised new and difficult questions about the exercise of papal authority? Is the Roman Church poised to become non-Western? Can popes and bishops teach effectively in a time of rampant individualism . . . . Continue Reading »

If you’re interested in either the thought of St. John Paul II or masculinity in general, this is the book for you. In the first two parts, Delaney brilliantly summarizes and explains John Paul’s philosophy of the human person and his theology of the body. In the latter half of the book, Delaney . . . . Continue Reading »

Matthew Schmitz aptly describes “Biden’s Collegiate Catholicism” (April 2024) in two senses. First, Biden’s agenda takes its ideological cues from, and serves the class interests of, the “most formidable redoubts of Democratic power”: the universities. Second, Biden’s politics embody . . . . Continue Reading »

Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization was a great victory for the pro-life cause. Prior to the 2022 decision, dubious constitutional interpretation by the Supreme Court had impeded any effective limits to abortion. And it had given us a Constitution that was—as William Lloyd . . . . Continue Reading »

If Famous Jewish Sports Legends is the leaflet in the punchline of a joke about “light reading” in the movie Airplane!, and Jewish Nobel Prize Winners would be a tome, Rabbi Meir Y. Soloveichik’s Providence and Power: Ten Portraits in Jewish Statesmanship is . . . . Continue Reading »

Most of us that grew up in the peripheries don’t buy the central premise of this pontificate of making the Church less European. I agree with R. R. Reno’s assertions in “Rome’s Concordat” (March 2024) that this pontificate sounds like a focus group at the World Economic Forum or a DEI . . . . Continue Reading »

There was a time when the Church shaped Western high art, particularly art music, as distinct from folk or pop music. That era has been over for centuries, yet the impetus for composers to engage with spirituality has endured. There has been no shortage of scholars in recent decades endeavoring to . . . . Continue Reading »

Living within a stone’s throw of the nation’s leading collection of Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood art housed at the Delaware Art Museum, I was familiar with Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s art but not his poetry. I therefore appreciate having been enlightened by Brian Patrick Eha’s “Rossetti the . . . . Continue Reading »

There’s a poem by John Donne that makes a presence of an absence; his absent love becomes as real to the speaker and more fully his than if she were present. This could illustrate what Katherine Rundell wants us to see in the work of John Donne, seventeenth-century metaphysical poet and preacher, . . . . Continue Reading »