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.…

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…

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…

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…

About two-thirds of the way through Brad Gooch’s highly acclaimed new book, Flannery: A Life of Flannery O’Connor , I got the gnawing feeling that something was missing—even as I admired Gooch’s storytelling about a brilliant writer of fiction who had…

We’ve been doing this for 17 years now, my colleagues and I—running an intensive, three-week, Cracow-based immersion course in Catholic social doctrine, centered on Pope John Paul II’s 1991 encyclical, Centesimus Annus. It’s been different this year, of course, what…

Pope Benedict XVI’s social encyclical, Caritas in Veritate [Charity in Truth], is a complex and occasionally obscure document, replete with possible implications for the future development of Catholic social doctrine. Sorting those implications out will take much time and even…