George Weigel

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 world. . . . . 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 »

Public expressions of piety at civic events may tell us something about a culture, but they rarely disclose geopolitical ambitions or strategic designs. One exception to that general rule of religion and public life took place this past February, in Kiev, capital of Ukraine … Continue Reading »

Over the past year, members and friends of the Legionaries of Christ and its affiliated lay movement, Regnum Christi, have worked hard in trying to “save what can be saved” from the wreckage created by revelations that the founder of these communities, Fr. Marcial Maciel Degollado, lived a vicious and duplicitous life of moral turpitude for decades … Continue Reading »

This year marks the fiftieth anniversary of John Courtney Murray’s We Hold These Truths: Catholic Reflections on the American Proposition ”arguably, the most important such reflection composed in our time. Its publication landed Fr. Murray, an urbane New York Jesuit, on the cover of Time . . . . Continue Reading »

The papal biographer writes Hans Küng to say, “your April 16 open letter to the world’s bishops, which I first read in the Irish Times, set new standards for that distinctive form of hatred known as odium theologicum and for mean-spirited condemnation of an old friend who had, on his rise to the papacy, been generous to you while encouraging aspects of your current work.” Continue Reading »