Twenty-five years ago, in one of its intervals of lucidity, the Norwegian Nobel Committee awarded the Nobel Peace Prize to an unemployed Polish electrician whose surname 95 percent of the world mispronounced. The electrician, Lech Walesa (pronounced vah-WHEN-suh, if you…

The Roman basilica of Sts. Cosmas and Damian tends to elude the casual tourist and the hurried pilgrim, although it’s right off the Via dei Fori Imperiali between Trajan’s column and the Coliseum. A visit at any time is worthwhile,…

Before tackling “Dignitas Personae” (”The Dignity of a Person”), the recent instruction from the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith on contemporary bioethical questions, I’d suggest re-reading the first chapter of Aldous Huxley’s “Brave New World.” Huxley was no great…

Because the media drama of the papacy often has St. Peter’s for its stage, many Catholics may not know that the Patriarchal Vatican Archbasilica isn’t the Pope’s cathedral. St. Peter’s belongs, in a sense, to the whole Church, and the…

The vagaries of scheduling put me in Europe for the week before the November 4 election. In conversations in both Rome and Cracow, I was struck by the frequency with which friends and colleagues said that Americans would be electing…

By the dawn’s early light on Nov. 5, two distinct Americas hove into view. The two Americas are not defined by conventional economic, ethnic or religious categories; it’s not rich America vs. poor America, black America vs. white America, or…

Father Christian Troll, a German Jesuit, is one of the Catholic Church’s leading students of Islam and a key figure in the Catholic-Islamic dialogue launched by Pope Benedict XVI’s September 2006 Regensburg Lecture. Speaking recently at Cambridge University, Father Troll…

I can’t remember precisely when I fell in love with history, but it was surely in the first innings of my reading life.

Granted, this was easier in the days when history was written and taught as, well, history — meaning…

There will be much to ponder, once this interminable electoral cycle comes to an end. Why has so much of the campaign seemed like a prolonged episode of “American Idol,” with candidates trying to sell their personal “narratives” rather than…

During the debate over ratification of the Constitution, Alexander Hamilton and his Federalists argued for “energy in the executive” — a strong president who would set the national agenda and be the center of legislative and policy initiative in the…