Perspective Archive

In the midst of the current crisis in our Church — with a once-admired cardinal accused of heinous acts, bishops widely judged incapable of policing themselves, investigators poring through Church […]

First circulated underground in communist Czechoslovakia in October 1978, Vaclav Havel’s brilliant dissection of totalitarianism, “The Power of the Powerless,” retains its salience four decades later. It should be required […]

One of the privileges we have as seminarians is going to school visits with either high school or grade school students. It is always a lot of fun to answer […]

As I write this, it is midwinter in the Northern Hemisphere. Like each season, winter has its time, its three months. To many of us, there seems to be a […]

I was once called, “stat,” to the emergency room to see a 17-year-old young man who collapsed while playing a pickup football game with friends at a local high school. […]

Like too many people in a post-fall world, I am someone with a deep father wound that, despite the immense love I have been surrounded with throughout my life, results […]

When the Pennsylvania grand jury issued its report last August chronicling the sexual abuse cases in six Pennsylvania dioceses, everybody thought they knew the whole story. After all, this was […]

By now the entire country has seen a video of a supposedly racist confrontation, in front of the Lincoln Memorial, between a grinning young high school student and a Native […]

All afternoon I had been hunkered over my MacBook, perched above a frozen lake and watching the sun cast pink into the clouds. I was thinking about what lie dormant […]

During the course of pregnancy, receiving an adverse prenatal diagnosis can be a tremendously jolting experience for parents. In severe cases, physicians may tell them that their unborn child has […]

One of our girls gave me a book for Christmas, “One Man’s Meat,” by E.B. White. We agreed to start a little book club, just the two of us — […]

In the early 1990s, the famed mystery author P.D. James published “The Children of Men.” Set in the year 2021, it describes a dystopian world where the human race had […]