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Dec 11, 2025
In the past week or so, as I write this, the President of the United States has called a reporter “piggy,” the Governor of Minnesota “retarded,” and an entire...
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Dec 5, 2025
In 2025, perhaps no public policy question has generated more commentary and protest than immigration and deportation. The matter is not confined to the U.S., of course, with...
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Dec 4, 2025
Observance of the Church year is among the many reasons that Catholicism makes more sense to me than did the Protestant evangelical tradition from which I converted. The liturgical...
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Nov 20, 2025
Through recent comments from Pope Leo XIV and a statement by the United States Bishops at the end of the annual meeting of the USCCB, immigration is again in the headlines of both...
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Nov 7, 2025
A major recent survey suggests that a new generation of Catholic priests is breaking free of the restrictive political labels of “conservative” and...
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Oct 29, 2025
I often thought of this passage from Brideshead as I read Christopher R. Altieri’s wonderful new book, Leo XIV: The New Pope and Catholic Reform.
Situating Pope...
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Oct 16, 2025
One of the more noteworthy episodes during the late nineteenth-century tenure of Pope Leo XIII was the pope’s response to the so-called “Americanist” controversy in...
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Oct 9, 2025
In my mind, therefore, the task is less to try to forge a Catholic-American consensus, than it is to articulate why Catholicism offers a richer, more vibrant, more stable set of...
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Oct 3, 2025
On September 30, Senator Dick Durbin announced that he is declining a “Lifetime Achievement Award” offered to him by the Archdiocese of Chicago. The heated controversy...
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Sep 30, 2025
This is my last column for Our Sunday Visitor as the magazine, print and online, ceases publication at the end of September. When then-editor Father Patrick Briscoe asked...
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Sep 19, 2025
The American political system is sometimes described as an “experiment in ordered liberty.” The metaphorical scientific language is important. To conduct an experiment,...
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Sep 4, 2025
The vicious transgender terrorist attack on Annunciation School in Minneapolis elicited the usual responses from the political left and right. From both sides, politicians...
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Aug 25, 2025
In perhaps the most famous sentences from St. Augustine’s magisterial fourth-century memoir, “Confessions,” the bishop of Hippo tells Our Lord, “You awaken us...
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Aug 15, 2025
The standard defense of the use of nuclear bombs in Japan is straightforward. Defenders assert that Japan would never surrender without a massive ground invasion by the allies. Such...
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Aug 7, 2025
On July 31, 2025, the Vatican press office reported that Pope Leo XIV will soon declare St. John Henry Newman to be a Doctor of the Church. Newman will be the 38th Doctor of the...
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Jul 30, 2025
A friend recently told me that my refusal to accept concepts like “nonbinary” and “transgender” is hurtful. Similarly hurtful is my refusal to use the wrong...
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Jul 23, 2025
To re-read an old favorite book is akin to being reunited with a close friend after some years apart. The sparks of friendship that fired the warmth of affection are rekindled....
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Jul 18, 2025
In Bob Dylan’s song “Only a Pawn in Their Game,” from his 1964 album, The Times They Are A-Changin’, Dylan lamented the 1963 assassination of civil...
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Jul 10, 2025
Over the course of the first week of July 2025, three separate events both portend the restoration of integrity in girls’ and women’s athletics and illustrate...
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Jul 4, 2025
On July 5, 1852, famed abolitionist Frederick Douglass delivered a speech in Rochester, New York, titled “What to the Slave Is the Fourth of July?” In his address,...
Aug 15, 2025The standard defense of the use of nuclear bombs in Japan is straightforward. Defenders assert that Japan would never surrender without a massive ground invasion by the allies. Such...