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The Costs of Commitment

When thinking of moral courage in the context of political life, I have at times imagined a bold politician refusing to support unjust laws. I could see someone who, like Eliot Richardson in those Watergate days, would step down from high office rather than execute the will of a superior who was dem

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College Students and Conversion

Each year hundreds of thousands of students from more than 400 colleges and universities complete the Freshman Survey of the Cooperative Institutional Research Program (CIRP), sponsored by the Higher Education Research Institute at U.C.L.A. Students are queried about demographic factors, academic an

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The Academic Mandatum

At the U.S. Catholic bishops meeting in November 2000, Archbishop Daniel Pilarczyk of Cincinnati reported on the progress made by the committee he chairs to draft guidelines concerning the academic mandatum in Catholic universities. The five-bishop committee has been assisted by four consultants app

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Loving the Sinner

In the lecture he gave when he received the Nobel prize for literature in 1970, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn remarked about totalitarian states: Violence does not live alone and is not capable of living alone: it is necessarily interwoven with falsehood. Between them lies the most intimate, the deepest of

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Foxfire Across the Border

On Dec. 1, while George W. Bush and Al Gore were hacking their way through legal thickets, Vicente Fox Quesada strode into the presidency of the United States of Mexico. It was a holiday that elicited from Mexicans, whose history has made them very cautious, much more hope than they are used to feel

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A Call to Global Action

The new millennium, with all its promise of change, presents us with a profound challenge: how to stem the rising incidence of global poverty. It is surely a major piece of unfinished business carried over from the previous century—how to give the poorest people of the world real hope for a be

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Social Security and the Poor

It is tempting to assess the modern debate over Social Security according to what any proposed changes will do for each of us personally. But many people, if not most, want a more principled approach to considering what, if anything, needs to be reformed. To these I suggest that there is a solid civ

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