It was an extraordinary moment at the Republican convention last month when Mike Huckabee, a Baptist preacher turned politician, criticized Barack Obama for insisting that people have to “violate their faith and conscience in order to comply with what he calls health care. Friends … let me say it as clearly as possible, that the attack on my Catholic brothers and sisters is an attack on me.” … Continue Reading»
Back in the day, altar boys loved to serve weddings because it involved ready cash: minimally, $5 (which in those days meant something), often a ten-spot. Once in a great while, an exceptionally generous best man would slip each server an envelope with $25”a small fortune to a boy in the early 1960s… . Continue Reading»
What if your child died at the age of 8 or 10? What would her eulogy be about? Perfect school attendance? What wonderful grades she got? How well-behaved she was in school? No. It would be about her smile, her love, the way she laughed. Sadly, many children who are simply prepared for adulthood”just as adults who merely prepare for retirement”find the time and space of their lives monopolized by what is not most important… . Continue Reading»
Almost exactly one year ago in this space, I offered anecdotal evidence of a previously unthinkable development: the growing distrust among senior citizens for a mainstream press whose credibility was, until very recently, so sterling that arguments among their set were definitively settled with the declaration, It has to be true! Its in the paper! … Continue Reading»
I recall watching Richard John Neuhaus address the National Association of Evangelicals when still a Lutheran pastor. He intoned in his sonorous voice at the start of his talk, We evangelicals … all the time smiling like a Cheshire cat. … Continue Reading»
When Dorothy Day was born, in 1897, no one could have imagined her eventual religious standing”least of all her parents, who rarely attended church. But a full century later, in cities throughout the world, Day was proposed for sainthood, and celebrated for her heroic work. The Washington Post summed up that anniversary well … Continue Reading»
When I was practicing law from the mid-1970s into the 1980s, there was tremendous emphasis given in the popular media and within the bar association to the cause of suicide prevention. Hotlines proliferated, anti-suicide billboards were ubiquitous, and a great deal of attention was paid to saving the lives of despairing people… . Continue Reading»
The Romney flap has revealed a divide among conservatives about those who receive government transfers. Those who insanely, self-destructively urge Romney to keep sticking it to the 47 percent are advocating a type of rhetoric that conservative outlets like the Wall Street Journal and National Review deliberately abandoned in the 1960s as they sought to build a broad-based political coalition . Continue Reading»
Oh no, I thought, here we go again. News of a long lost textual fragment which many will think could undermine traditional Christian faith is breaking, the latest in a long line of interesting discoveries sensationalized by the media into something supposedly subversive of traditional Christian faith. Whether the frenzy concerned the claims of The Sacred Mushroom and the Cross, the Secret Gospel of Mark, St. James supposed ossuary, or the Gospel of Judas, when the smoke cleared, traditional Christianity was left standing… . Continue Reading»
It is a story of relentlessly unforced errors, also of profound naiveté bordering on at least misdemeanor incompetence. It is also the story of a masterful, even breathtaking, political takedown. On one side was the much loved Susan G. Komen for the Cure, a foundation that in 30 years became the worlds largest funder of breast cancer research, founded by the striking Texan Nancy Brinker, a woman of the center right who nonetheless practically walked on water for liberals… . Continue Reading»