As Americans wait, hopefully or apprehensively as the case may be, to see what happens next to the Obama legislative agenda, a question unavoidably suggests itself: how on earth did we get into this mess? A mess that evidently transcends…

It’s hardly news that politicians sometimes say things to particular audiences simply in hopes of pleasing them, without necessarily meaning to follow through on what they seem to have promised. Perhaps that explains President Barack Obama’s odd performance on funding…

Was 2009 a turning point for the American bishops, marking a tougher and more realistic approach on their part to the myriad problems, internal and external, besetting the Catholic Church in the United States? It’s too soon for final conclusions,…

The sad case of Tiger Woods offers the familiar spectacle of media and the public setting a celebrity on a pedestal, then taking gleeful satisfaction in knocking him off. If this episode has redeeming value, it’s the reminder that even…

For 16 of the 36 years the Catholic League for Religious and Civil Rights has been in business, it’s been headed by Dr. William Donohue. In that time Bill Donohue has put his own distinctive mark on this feisty anti-defamation…

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For me at least, the most dismaying thing about criticism of Pope Benedict’s plan for easing the way for Anglicans who seek to enter the Roman Catholic Church is the critics’ apparent indifference to the spiritual welfare of these Anglicans.…

European secular liberals and certain people at the Vatican may not have many things in common, but there’s one thing they unquestionably do share: high hopes for the presidency of Barack Obama. The awarding of the Nobel Peace Prize to…

Someone I know pretty well, a doctoral candidate in philosophy, has lately been doing editorial work for an encyclopedia in order to earn some money on the side. When she’s engaged in that activity, she keeps at hand a stout…

A thoughtful and not unsympathetic discussion of a papal encyclical in a secular, liberal political journal? After all, why not? David Nirenberg’s treatment of Pope Benedict XVI’s economic encyclical Caritas in Veritate (Charity in Truth) in the September 23 New…