George Weigel

The conversation over dinner was wide-ranging, and at one point, after the usual papal kidding about my having written “a very big book,” John Paul asked about the international reception of Witness to Hope, his biography, which I had published five years earlier… . Continue Reading »

Given the degree to which American politics has deteriorated into barrages of sound-bites, it may seem quixotic”perhaps even idiotic”to indulge my biennial habit of proposing Questions Candidates Should Be Asked by Catholics serious about bringing moral reasoning into the public square… . Continue Reading »

Thirty years ago, on Aug. 31, 1980, an electrician named Lech Walesa signed the Gdansk Accords, ending a two-week-old strike at that Hanseatic city’s Lenin Shipyards. Walesa signed with a giant souvenir pen featuring a portrait of Pope John Paul II… . Continue Reading »

Pope Benedict XVI’s pastoral visit to Great Britain next month will unfold along a pilgrim’s path metaphorically strewn with landmines. Headline-grabbing new atheists like Richard Dawkins, along with their allies in the international plaintiff’s bar, may try to have the pontiff arrested as an enabler of child abuse… . Continue Reading »

Last month, I was happy to join with former Spanish prime minister Jose Maria Aznar, Nobel Peace Prize laureate David Trimble, Italian philosopher and political leader Marcello Pera, and several other international figures in launching a global “Friends of Israel” Initiative, which debuted in the United States in a July 8 Wall Street Journal op-ed article… . Continue Reading »

On June 30, 1980, the U.S. Supreme Court issued its decision in Harris v. McRae and upheld the constitutionality of the Hyde Amendment, which had prohibited federal funding for Medicaid abortions since 1976. Three decades later, Harris v. McRae remains the pro-life movement’s most important legal victory since Roe v. Wade created a “right to abortion” in 1973… . Continue Reading »

My home is a 45-minute drive from Gettysburg National Military Park, a site I’ve visited many times, never without some emotion. The nature of that emotion crystallized for me a few years ago when I took some Australian friends on an audio tour of the battlefield with the help of Father Scott Newman, pastor of St. Mary’s Church in Greenville, S.C., who drove the other car in our small motorcade… . Continue Reading »

Over the past ninety years or so, the American debate about the national interest and the national purpose”the debate about morality and foreign policy”has careened through at least ten cycles, resulting in numerous, and sometimes jarring, shifts in the nation’s approach to the . . . . Continue Reading »

One does wonder sometimes about God’s ways with his most devoted servants. Several years back, Father James Schall, S.J., one of the greatest of American Jesuits and the living embodiment of Catholic liberal learning at Georgetown, was struck by an illness that cost him an eye. This summer, Father Schall is recovering from some nasty surgery, which involved removing a cancerous jawbone and its attendant teeth and replacing the jaw with bone taken from Schall’s leg… . Continue Reading »

Roland Bainton, who died in 1984, was a fixture at the Yale Divinity School for more than four decades and remained an influential Church historian over during two decades of retirement. His most popular book was Here I Stand: A Life of Martin Luther; but Luther scholarship has gone far beyond Bainton since Here I Stand was published in 1950. Bainton’sChristian Attitudes Toward War and Peace, however, which was first published in 1960, continues to exert a significant influence on Christian thought today. The question is whether that influence is helpful, or baleful… . Continue Reading »