Remembering Benedict

by Charles J. Chaput

For me, two couplets will always capture the essence of Pope Benedict XVI: faith and reason, realism and hope. Continue Reading »

4 Jan 2023

The Realism We Need

by Edward Lucas

What Hitchens fails to spot is that the Soviet Union was not just about Communism, or about Russia. It was an empire. One hundred twenty million-plus of the Soviet Union’s two hundred eighty-six-million population were non-Russians. Almost none of them were Soviet by choice, any more than the one hundred million people in the other Warsaw Pact countries wanted to be under Soviet tutelage. To view the collapse of the evil empire solely from a Russian point of view is therefore misleading. Continue Reading »

4 Oct 2016

Flannery O'Connor and Catholic Realism

by George Weigel

From this vale of tears, one can never be sure about the boundaries of acceptable behavior at the Throne of Grace. Is laughter at earthly foibles permitted? Encouraged? I like to think so. Which inclines me to believe that, this past June 3, Miss Mary Flannery O’Connor of Milledgeville, Georgia, was having herself a good cackle. Continue Reading »

22 Jul 2015

Solzhenitsyn's Red Wheel

by Daniel J. Mahoney

It is not uncommon for readers of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s final novel, The Red Wheel, to draw comparisons with another Russian masterpiece, Leo Tolstoy’s War and Peace. Like its predecessor, The Red Wheel is a massive, sweeping work, six thousand pages divided into four . . . . Continue Reading »

1 May 2015