Those of us in the pro-life movement often claim that we live in a “culture of death.” But most of us don’t believe it. Not really. We may use the phrase as a rhetorical tool, but deep in our hearts we think that our family, friends, and neighbors wouldn’t knowingly kill another human being. We convince ourselves that they simply don’t realize what they’re doing… . Continue Reading »
Dr. Habib Malik of the Lebanese American University has been a friend for many years. Few men have such an informed and humane view of the sad, even desperate, position of Christians in the Middle East. As a Lebanese Maronite with a Harvard doctorate in intellectual history, what Dr. Malik knows comes from experience as well as impeccable scholarship. … Continue Reading »
Throughout Lent the Catholic headlines have been disheartening. Ash Wednesday saw us lining up for ashes and hearing the words, “turn away from sin and be faithful to the Gospel” even as the headlines blared the sickening news of 21 priests suspended in Philadelphia on sexual abuse allegations. “It feels,” wrote a friend, “like these nests of filth will never be cleaned out, not in our lifetimes.” “It feels,” I replied, “like we can never do enough penance, like there isn’t enough penance in the world,” to ever make amends… . Continue Reading »
Two-something years ago, after the election of Barack Obama over an inconsistently conservative Republican, when the right’s future looked dim, almost everyone on the right seems to have started arguing about the future of conservatism: not so much over what it is, but over who is a real one, who is committed and who will compromise, who are the heretics, apostates, and moles, what are its political prospects, and how to win back power… . Continue Reading »
This was not the topic I wanted to write about today”Fridays should be days when nothing of importance is ever said”but sometimes one gets unexpectedly diverted. Just the day before yesterday, Joe Carter produced a column taking the bishops of Arizona to task for their recent denunciation of capital punishment as incompatible with the gospel, and arguing further not only that capital punishment is permissible from a Christian perspective, but that it is positively required by scripture… . Continue Reading »
Richard Neuhaus described something I once wrote for First Things magazine as “winsomely forceful.” I thought that was an unusually charming turn of phrase, he was good at them, and it honestly was the tone I tried to achieve in my “uninformed” piece last Thursday on immigration. For those of you who missed last week’s column due to life threatening illness or because you had to get the dog wormed (the only plausible reasons I can imagine for skipping my golden prose) I talked about illegal immigration … Continue Reading »
Last week the state of Arizona executed Eric John King for two murders that occurred during a robbery in December 1989 that netted $72. On the same day the prelates of the Arizona Catholic Conference released a statement expressing vehement opposition to the death penalty. “We firmly hold that capital punishment is state-sanctioned vengeance,” said the bishops, “that is not in keeping with the Gospel of Jesus Christ.” I confess that these claims left me flabbergasted… . Continue Reading »
In the fall of 2007, I spent a week in Spain, giving lectures, meeting with Spanish Catholic leaders, and making a hair-raising climb up several hundred scaffolding stairs to the top of Antoni Gaudi’s Basilica of the Sagrada Familia in Barcelona”preceded by Cardinal Stanislaw Dziwisz, John Paul II’s longtime secretary, who was doing the trip in a cassock (after confessing to me, sotto voce, that he wasn’t too fond of heights)! … Continue Reading »
Having made my first promises in 2002 (after three years of dallying), next year I will celebrate ten years as a fully professed Benedictine Oblate. I’m sure my Holy Father Benedict is rolling his eyes, and thinking, “Oh, bully, kid, let me get my shoes and I’ll do a jig for you. Have you gotten that Rule down, yet?” Errr, well, no, Father. Not yet. Especially not that part about receiving all guests as Christ… . Continue Reading »
Back in the days of Ronald Reagan, when I was a liberal and (by my own current estimation) a heathen, I was convinced that he was the anti-Christ. After all, he had six letters in each of his names. He was dismantling FDR’s New Deal and LBJ’s Great Society. He was causing the deaths of innocent children by cutting their mothers’ food stamps. He was building an arsenal that would destroy the earth… . Continue Reading »
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