September 1, 2018 (1,198 words)
From my perch outside the enchanted circle, it seems nabbing a spot as a regular commentator in the prestige print media requires a serendipitous combination of talent and connections. When the…

August 29, 2018 (187 words)
My mother had two enduring passions to the very end of her life: Olives, and the music of Ella Fitzgerald. So every birthday my father came through like clock-work with a can of black olives, a can of green…

August 27, 2018 (1,951 words)
The Catholic Church’s dark night of the soul continues. Earlier this month Pennsylvania’s attorney general issued a scathing report on a handful of dioceses across the state, going back some 70 years, which…

August 23, 2018 (290 words)
Many of us admire Ken Langone for his shrewd business acumen and his generous philanthropic efforts. And we agree that his recent $100 million contribution…

August 12, 2018 (2,776 words)
We all start out thinking we’ll live to a ripe old age, and die peacefully in our sleep. But eventually we come to realize that aging gracefully and dying gently is a rare circumstance, experienced only by the…

July 30, 2018 (486 words)
The story is told of Jesus feeding a hungry multitude from what at first appeared to be a meager pantry. In a surprise turn of events, not only was everyone in attendance able to eat their fill that day, free of charge…

July 26, 2018 (637 words)
As a charter remember of the “never been sick a day in his life” club, the last few years have been a humbling experience for me. The decline started innocently enough, as it usually does, with fading eyesight…

July 16, 2018 (1,303 words)
The inability of conservatives to properly delineate the historical fault lines of our cultural problems is why we find ourselves in such disarray. They continue to misdiagnose its origins, and mash together categories…

July 13, 2018 (1,658 words)
Given the contentious nature of our adversarial political system, the custom has always been for the opposition party, the one not currently in power, to go out of its way to find fault with the ruling…

July 10, 2018 (1,037 words)
For the last forty-five years religious conservatives distraught over the legalization of abortion have employed a three-step approach to national politics. Elect a pro-life Republican as…

July 6, 2018 (778 words)
Ever since Budd Schulberg’s lacerating 1958 screenplay for A Face In The Crowd, and the 1968 Joe McGinniss bestseller, The Selling Of The President, and the 1972 vehicle for Robert Redford…

July 2, 2018 (962 words)
Summertime and the living is easy, according to the lyricist Ira Gershwin. This is especially true for those lucky, early-retirement people, for whom life has unfolded in a most agreeable fashion…

June 16, 2018 (1,787 words)
I was reminded of this burning question by our youngest son, who had a lot of trouble with his just-completed junior year of high school biology. The job of finding a tutor to help with his summer-school…

June 13, 2018 (437 words)
On the day of the latest British royal wedding, the one between Prince Harry and the American actress Meghan Markle…

June 10, 2018 (2,244 words)
This pithy formula is favored by economists of a libertarian bent, erstwhile academics specializing in theoretical constructions based on elaborate data. Data, as we know, has firmly established itself…

June 8, 2018 (333 words)
The Wanderer, a venerable Catholic newsweekly that’s been going to press since October 1867, has now had two of its regular contributors review the new Ross Douthat book on this troubling papacy…

May 28, 2018 (108 words)
One minute, your house is full of cute little kids whose mission in life is to bounce around and spread joy. The next minute these same sweet children have become surly young…

May 26, 2018 (1,528 words)
Yesterday voters in Ireland overwhelming decided to roll back the Eighth Amendment to their constitution, originally passed in 1983, and remove the restriction it had placed on abortion. In dramatic…

May 23, 2018 | (2,304 words)
I am now well into my seventh decade of continuous residency on the western fringe of the Archdiocese of Philadelphia, though I did enjoy a twenty year sabbatical from belief and practice in the middle trimester, to pursue some bad…

May 16, 2018 | (1,124 words)
I’ve noticed that people my age are starting to check out and die, which is a most disconcerting development. My long-ago best friend and one-time business partner, Jim Gillis, passed away recently…

May 9, 2018 | (299 words)
Life is more like a book, than a movie. Consider the way our faith tells us that sexual activity outside of marriage is contrary to the natural law that is written on our…

May 6, 2018 | (1,883 words)
Pope Francis is certainly a hotly debated topic of conversation these days. The discussion ranges from the uncritical praise of his every act or utterance, to the ruthless criticism of his every ambiguous…

May 2, 2018 | (1,969 words)
The fifty-year anniversary of the papal encyclical Humanae Vitae is fast approaching (July 1968). That’s the one in which Paul VI reaffirmed traditional Church teaching on the dire consequences of artificial…

April 28, 2018 | (1,982 words)
William Galston writes for the Wall Street Journal, is a senior fellow at the Brookings Institute, teaches at the University of Maryland, and was a former policy advisor in the Clinton…

April 14, 2018 (1,300 words)
Yesterday New York Times op-ed columnist Ross Douthat gave an interview on National Public Radio (NPR) in support of his new book, To Change the Church: Pope Francis and the Future of Catholicism. This is an…

April 3, 2018 | (1,185 words)
The gentleman who is trying to drive traffic to this web site has asked me to provide a series of descriptive words that define it. He has also asked a series of basic questions with the same idea in mind. My descriptive words and attempts at…

April 1, 2018 | (141 words)
Provided one is able to muster the necessary stamina, there is nothing like a long, thorough Holy Saturday service at an observant Catholic parish to remind one of the benefits of communal…

March 31, 2018 | (816 words)
Yesterday was both Good Friday and the first night of Passover. Late last night, as I was drifting off to sleep, a gentleman on a National Public Radio broadcast explained…

March 17, 2018 | (1,000 words)
I’ve been thinking about my wife’s dead parents a lot lately, almost as much as my own. After some thirty-six years in relationship, persistent annoyance interspersed with transcendent joy…

March 11, 2018 | (2,224 words)
Is it just me, or does columnist Ross Douthat also strike you as being fundamentally different from other high profile op-ed writers? His relative youth (b. 1979) is one distinguishing characteristic, to be sure. He is the youngest full-time…

March 1, 2018 | (869 words)
“For centuries, the Catholic Church sought to limit the circulation of Bible translations in order to control access to the word of God.” This sentence, a little landmine of libel to some of us, is found in the DEUS EX MACHINA essay by…

February 24, 2018 | (2,282 words)
In the Fall of 1960, still one full year shy of turning seven and achieving the age of reason, my formal classroom education commenced that September under the watchful eye of a small handful of Catholic nuns.

February 9, 2018 | (1,412 words)
Most of us made up our minds on this subject years ago. So we have no need for, nor do we pay particularly close attention to, the periodic announcements that continue to pop up in the news from time-to-time…

December 28, 2017 | (1,370 words)
After an exhilarating half-century of sexual revolution, now is a good time to maybe step back and take stock. As everyone knows, our contemporary era of free love was initiated by the invention of a…

December 15, 2017 | (91 words)
The first twenty years are an introduction to things. The next forty years are a matter of making one’s way in the rowdy world. Now having given up the chase, the last twenty years of this man’s lif…

November 24, 2017 | (4,346 words)
For those who may be unfamiliar with her work, Linda Greenhouse is a New York Times Contributing Op-Ed Writer who covers the Supreme Court and the law. Her November 12, 2017 effort is entitled “The W…

October 3, 2017 | (15,215 words)
Well, the long wait is finally over. With “Bergoglio in Context: Have the End Times come to Buenos Aires,” appearing in the June 2017 issue of Culture Wars magazine, readers now know where their fear…

September 12, 2017 | (295 words)
Some Catholics find themselves drawn to a charismatic expression of their faith, while others are more naturally given to a quiet, contemplative pose. Some are what might be described as being of the…

August 6, 2017 | (280 words)
Once our children reach the age of reason, a good deal of their subsequent development into civilized human beings occurs at the dinner table. There is the mastery of basic cutlery, of course, along…

June 26, 2017 | (3,678 words)
It’s now been several decades since the slogan “our diversity is our strength” first became a popular refrain, and entered the vernacular as an accepted piece of wisdom. This is generally considered…