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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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) […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
Uncategorized
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]