George Weigel

How to capture the essence of Richard John Neuhaus and his impact on others? Perhaps numbers help. As anyone who knew Richard even slightly would recognize, this is somewhat counterintuitive. When Jim Nuechterlein handed over the editorship of this journal to Jody Bottum, he had one word of advice . . . . Continue Reading »

President Obama’s first choice for secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services was former South Dakota senator Tom Daschle¯a pro-abortion Catholic Democrat. President Obama’s second choice for secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services is Kansas Gov. . . . . Continue Reading »

The conventional Beltway wisdom on the 2008 presidential election was summed up, unsurprisingly, by David Broder in a Washington Post column published on November 2, 2008, forty-eight hours before the vote. Barack Obama, Broder wrote, had demonstrated an “impressive” capacity to . . . . Continue Reading »

In May 2006, the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith (CDF) made public its decision to “invite” Fr. Marcial Maciel, founder of the religious order the Legion of Christ and the lay movement Regnum Christi, to “a reserved life of penitence and prayer, relinquishing any form of . . . . Continue Reading »

The Faithful: A History of Catholics in America by James M. O’Toole Harvard University Press, 384 pages, $27.95 The ideological pretentiousness often found in the fever swamps of contemporary social history is easily dismissed as so much Marxist exhaust. A more modest approach to reading . . . . Continue Reading »

Seeking ideas for presents this year, we asked several of our well-read friends and contributors for recommendations of a few wise, or fun, or disturbing books that every First Things reader should know”limited only by the request that the lists not include the Bible, Shakespeare, or volumes by . . . . Continue Reading »

Campaigning for the French presidency last year, Nicolas Sarkozy ran hard against what Europeans still refer to as 1968 , describing the post-1968 New Left as “immoral” and “cynical” and defining the choice before the French electorate in stark terms: “In this election, the question is . . . . Continue Reading »

In September 1984, I had a sabbatical year at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars. One day—while I was having lunch with a Seattle congressman, Joel Pritchard, then in the midst of a bout of chemotherapy—a portly gentleman came up to our table to ask Joel how he was feeling. . . . . Continue Reading »

In the early 1950s, or so I’m told, two young men who would later come to world prominence attended some of the same political science lectures at the Sorbonne. One was the son of Polish-Jewish parents who had emigrated to France; the other was from Cambodia. One had lost his mother to the . . . . Continue Reading »

The first phase of the Iraq Wars came to a dramatic”and ominously prophetic”denouement on that heady day in April 2003 when U.S. Marines stormed into central Baghdad and pulled down a statue of Saddam Hussein that the local citizenry couldn’t quite manage to topple. Several months . . . . Continue Reading »