Eleven percent of New Hampshire's conservatives favor crony capitalist, eminent domain abuser, supporter of single-payer health care, and all-around-buffoon, Donald Trump for president. But they don't really. A fraction of the Republican electorate is having some weird fun with the conventions and . . . . Continue Reading »
Fifty years ago, prior to my freshman year at Baltimore’s St. Paul Latin High School, the late Fr. W. Vincent Bechtel introduced me to The Summer Reading List, upper-case. Fr. Bechtel didn’t fool around: He tossed his teenage charges into the deep end of the English and American literature pool . . . . Continue Reading »
We are relearning that marriage is not optional. The evidence started piling up in 1965 with Daniel Patrick Moynihan’s report on the breakdown of the African-American family. In 2012, Charles Murray took us on a walk through Fishtown where we met a white (often non-)working class. In 2014, Kevin . . . . Continue Reading »
Two questions underlie this study of the months leading up to the American Civil War: 1) At what point, if any, was Abraham Lincoln morally justified in fighting the Confederacy? and 2) Could an agreement have been reached that would have prevented the Civil War? Continue Reading »
You’ve heard the horror stories about the schools: kindergartens with a dose of amoral sex education; teachers sowing gender confusion with the hearty support of administrators; violence and widespread drug use in the tony prep schools that train tomorrow’s elites; depression, eating disorders, . . . . Continue Reading »
The First World War lingers in the memory as humanity’s first encounter with industrialized killing on a mass scale. New weapons of the machine age obliterated forests, villages and fields—an entire way of life. This new type of war also deeply shaped the thinking of men who experienced it . . . . Continue Reading »
Leonard was one of those pastoral visits pastors avoid.He was a guy who just got lost in the life of the congregation. He got mad at a pastor back in the mid-1950s and stopped attending worship. He came on and off—mostly off—during successive pastorates thereafter, but never with any regularity. . . . . Continue Reading »
A great variety of people are looking forward to reading and digesting Pope Francis’s new encyclical, Laudato Si, which the Vatican officially releases today. I am as interested in reading it as the next person, but maybe not immediately. That comment may understandably demand some defense, or at . . . . Continue Reading »
Commentators are sure to make the false claim that Pope Francis has aligned the Church with modern science. They’ll say this because he endorses climate change. But that’s a superficial reading of Laudato Si. In this encyclical, Francis expresses strikingly anti-scientific, anti-technological, . . . . Continue Reading »
The Syllabus of Errors, issued in 1864 under the auspices of Pope Pius IX, famously ends by condemning the proposition that “The Roman Pontiff can, and ought to, reconcile himself, and come to terms with progress, liberalism, and modern civilization.”Is Pope Francis a latter day Pio Nono? Such . . . . Continue Reading »
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