Matthew Schmitz

The Young Pope depicts a Church that no longer seeks the favor of the world—and is all the more fabulous for . . . . Continue Reading »

Children are not exposed to enough violence. Yes, I know the grim statistics, how a child who enters middle school has already witnessed 8,000 murders and 100,000 other violent acts on TV. As he and his friends enter adolescence, they take up first-person shooter video games. In college, he becomes . . . . Continue Reading »

A pope who speaks with singular eloquence of our need to resist the technocratic logic of the “throwaway culture” seems bent on leading his Church to surrender to it. Continue Reading »

Exodusby thomas joseph white, o.p.brazos, 336 pages, $32.99 In days past, to study Scripture was to study the tradition of its reception. The sacred text was read with the Fathers of the Church, accompanied by commentaries and catenae, with frequent glosses explaining the meaning of difficult . . . . Continue Reading »

During my time at Princeton, there was no more popular insult than “tool,” an epithet hurled at anyone who tried too hard. Of course, the term was unavoidably classist. An Amazon executive’s daughter who had attended Lakeside or a banker’s son who’d gone to St. Ann’s didn’t have to . . . . Continue Reading »

We require both judgment and mercy. Continue Reading »

Catholics must now discard the idea of an aspirational centrism, and embrace the role of unashamed dissent. Continue Reading »

Will Catholics uphold the Church's teaching that the divorced and remarried cannot be admitted to communion, or will they reject it? Pope Francis has brought this question before the Church, though he refuses to formulate it so starkly. Continue Reading »

Red, White, Blue, and Catholicby stephen p. whiteliguori, 101 pages, $12.99 In this primer on Catholic citizenship, the Ethics and Public Policy Center’s Stephen White reminds us that faithful citizenship is about love—“love for the people and institutions to which we are bound by birth and by . . . . Continue Reading »

Christianity is a religion of losers. To the weak and humble, it offers a stripped and humiliated Lord. . . . . Continue Reading »