Michael Sean Winters

Sudanese President Omar Hassan al-Bashir responded to his indictment by the International Criminal Court by expelling foreign aid groups currently providing food water and medicine in Darfur Among the groups expelled are CARE International Doctors Without Borders and Oxfam According to press ac

The Dow Jones Industrial Average dropped yesterday to where it was in 1997 The date caught my attention That was the year before the Glass-Stiegel Act was repealed allowing banks into the investment business I hope the investor class is realizing that this may not be a coincidence What is the s

The nomination of Kansas Governor Kathleen Sebelius to be Secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services has done more to ignite the intra-Catholic culture wars even than President Obama rsquo s decision to reverse the Mexico City policy As the announcement neared Catholic partisans of a

The Obama administration has decided to repeal a last-minute Bush administration regulation granting wide protections to health care workers from being fired or otherwise penalized for a religiously based unwillingness to perform acts they find morally objectionable The decision is regrettable even

God is in the details is one of those strange aphorisms that has longer legs than it should I do not suspect to find God going through the details of President Obama rsquo s newly minted budget But it is clear that what one will find therein is the other half of the title of his book If his c

The Supreme Court waded into the murky waters of the Establishment Clause yesterday and reached a surprising unanimous verdict In Utah a town park holds many monuments one of them to the Ten Commandments A fringe religious group called Summum that combines elements of pseudo-Christian Gnosticis

President Barack Obama rsquo s entrance into the House chamber even more than the Inauguration sent chills up my spine This scene is more familiar than an Inauguration and just so to see Obama come down the aisle after the Sargeant-of-Arms announces Madame Speaker the President of the United

The President addresses a joint session of Congress for the first time tonight Despite the lack of Republican support for his stimulus bill and the churlish and I suspect risky refusal of some GOP governors to receive some of the federal money in that bill look for President Obama to continue to

The Church in New York and indeed all of America rejoices this morning at the announcement that Pope Benedict XVI has named Archbishop Timothy Michael Dolan to be the next Archbishop of New York I have never seen Archbishop Dolan that he didn rsquo t have his arm around someone We first met in R

Sen Roland Burris should resign There is no evidence that he engaged in a direct pay-to-play scheme with former Governor Rod Blagojevich People in Burris rsquo s position ndash he served thirty years in public office ndash are asked to raise money by other politicians all the time And perhap