George Weigel

Moral theologians have long disputed the point at which a child reaches the “age of reason.” But surely, in these United States, the answer is clear: one reaches the “age of reason” when one can read the box scores (the baseball box scores, of course) in the morning paper. For to grasp the . . . . Continue Reading »

Many great novelists have had intricate, even prickly, personalities. But in Evelyn Waugh, nature and grace worked overtime to produce an extraordinary character, a full understanding of whose complexities would require the combined skills of an archaeologist, a psychiatrist, and a Jesuit confessor . . . . Continue Reading »

Over the past decade, Father Thomas J. Reese, S.J., a fellow of the Woodstock Theological Center in Washington, has become perhaps the most dogged, and certainly the most prolific, Catholic bishop-watcher in the United States. Collecting and retailing stories about bishops has a long history, of . . . . Continue Reading »

Anyone eager for an inside and in-depth exploration of the New Russian Revolution of August 1991 can thank a watchful Providence that James H. Billington, the Librarian of Congress and America’s foremost historian of Russian culture, just happened to be in Moscow on library business when . . . . Continue Reading »

Toward the end of this collection of essays, Professor Iván Völgyes gently chastises his brethren in the history and political science confraternities for the fact that “all too frequently … many of us in our profession … made compromises with the Communist regimes” of the old . . . . Continue Reading »

The year 1991 marked the centenary of modern Catholic social teaching—the issuing of the encyclical Rerum Novarum by Pope Leo XIII—and the bicentenary of the Bill of Rights to the United States Constitution. It might have come as something of a shock to the (very Protestant) . . . . Continue Reading »

On July 6,1991, the Italian Jesuit biweekly, La Civilta Cattolica, published a lengthy editorial arguing that the just war tradition should no longer be considered normative in Catholic thinking about the ethics of war and peace. Those familiar with the ideological peregrinations of many members of . . . . Continue Reading »

About the public debate preceding Operation Desert Storm, two things may be said with some confidence. First, there has rarely been such a sustained (and in many respects impressive) public grappling with the moral criteria and political logic of the just war tradition. Administration officials, . . . . Continue Reading »

Catholics in America have rarely taken the study of their history seriously. My own educational circumstances, which were hardly unique, may illustrate the point. In nineteen years (1956-75) of a generally excellent Catholic education in church-sponsored schools and seminaries, I never once was . . . . Continue Reading »

Who could have imagined, on that May afternoon in 1983 when the National Conference of Catholic Bishops adopted “The Challenge of Peace,” that senior figures in the American Catholic opinion elite would concede, by the end of the decade, that the bishops’ pastoral was, in a sense, “already . . . . Continue Reading »