On Sept. 28, a bipartisan group of 187 members of the U.S. House of Representatives, led by Michigan Democrat Bart Stupak and Pennsylvania Republican Joe Pitts, sent a letter to House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Rules Committee Chair Louise Slaughter.…

During the brutally hot summer of 2003, thousands of French vacationers remained on holiday rather than returning home to bury their recently deceased parents, who had died from the extraordinary heat and were being stashed in air-conditioned storage lockers. Those…

The Norwegian Nobel Committee looked in the mirror, saw the president of the United States, and awarded the 2009 Nobel Peace Prize to Barack Obama. One is tempted to vary Rainer Maria Rilke (“Love consists in this, that two solitudes…

The Thirty Years War looms large in the contemporary secularist imagination. There, it’s simply taken for granted that religious fanaticism laid waste to Europe between 1618 and 1648, and that the carnage only stopped when the exhausted powers of the…

Several years ago, after Irving Kristol had had a cancerous lung removed, Father Richard John Neuhaus visited him in the hospital. After they chatted briefly, Father Neuhaus, at the door on his way out, turned back toward the bed and…

On Christmas Day, 1991, Mikhail Gorbachev transferred the Soviet nuclear codes to Boris Yeltsin, called President George H.W. Bush to wish him a happy Christmas, and picked up a pen, intending to sign the document that would dissolve the Union…

On Oct. 4, the Baltimore Orioles will take the field at Camden Yards against the Toronto Blue Jays and, win or lose, complete their 12th losing season in a row—which, for losing streaks, puts my beloved Birds in roughly the…

The public accomplishments of Senator Edward M. Kennedy, who died on Aug. 25, will be discussed and debated for years, and perhaps decades. He was the only one of the Kennedy brothers who took the United States Senate seriously, and…

In 2001, when chairman Leon Kass was organizing the President’s Council on Bioethics (which was recently and foolishly disbanded by President Obama), he sent the Council members some interesting homework to read before their first discussion in 2001: Nathaniel Hawthorne’s…

A year or so ago I got a letter from a man with whom I’d first begun corresponding shortly after his tour as an infantry lieutenant in Iraq. If memory serves, we began by discussing various questions of just war…