George Weigel

The Catholic Difference

George Weigel Distinguished Senior Fellow of the Ethics and Public Policy Center in Washington, D.C. 

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Perspective

Doubling down on a bad deal

Perseverance on a difficult but noble path is a virtue. Stubbornness when confronted by irrefutable evidence of a grave mistake is a vice. The latter would seem an apt characterization […]

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Perspective

Auschwitz and ‘intrinsic evil’

Seventy-five years ago, on Jan. 27, 1945, the infantrymen of the Red Army’s 322nd Rifle Division were bludgeoning their way into the Third Reich when they discovered the Auschwitz-Birkenau extermination […]

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Perspective

‘The Two Popes’: baloney, brilliantly acted

I first met Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI in June 1988; over the next three decades, I’ve enjoyed many lengthy conversations and interviews with him, including a bracing discussion covering many […]

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Perspective

Books for Christmas – 2019

Resist the twitterization of thought — give books for Christmas! The following titles will delight, instruct, edify or all of the above: “Churchill: Walking with Destiny” by Andrew Roberts (Viking) […]

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Perspective

Fearlessness and the American bishops in Rome

I once knew a Congregationalist minister — Yale Divinity School graduate, decorated World War II chaplain, veteran campaigner for then-unpopular liberal causes — of whom it was said (sometimes by […]

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Perspective

Historical clarity, today’s contentions

One of the curiosities of the 21st-century Catholic debate is that many Catholic traditionalists, especially integralists, and a high percentage of Catholic progressives make the same mistake in analyzing the […]

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Perspective

What kind of ‘believers’?

This past June I was in the Munich area for four days, giving a public lecture on Evangelical Catholicism and doing a lot of media interviews. My hosts were exceptionally […]

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As ‘The League’ begins its centennial season …

By the gargantuan standards of the 21st-century National Football League, Gino Marchetti, who died this past April 29, was undersized at 6-foot-4 and a mere 245 pounds. But he was […]

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Perspective

Getting beyond Darwin

Bishop Robert Barron and others working hard to evangelize the “Nones” — young adults without religious conviction — tell us that a major obstacle to a None embracing Christianity is […]

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Perspective

The summer reading list

Continuing a venerable tradition, I offer the following for your canicular reading pleasure:  John Hay spent decades at the center of American public life as Lincoln’s secretary and biographer, a […]

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Perspective

On the composting of thee and me

In Herman Wouk’s novel, “War and Remembrance,” Warren Henry shocks his Bible-reading father, the novel’s hero, by claiming that human beings are “microbes on a grain of dust … and […]

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Perspective

Creation, redemption, martyrdom

A Lenten quiz: Which came first, God’s creation of the world or God’s covenant with Israel? If we think in terms of mere chronology, the answer is obvious. If we […]