"No young man believes he shall ever die,” said William Hazlitt, the 19th-century British essayist. That shrewd observation is contradicted in times of war. A 22-year-old machine gunner with a French battalion in Korea in the 1950’s wrote to his father: “In our time, when you

To judge by the presidential campaign, civil discourse in the United States lies exhausted and beaten alongside the campaign trail, a victim of the culture wars. Problems produced by the Iraq war are mounting, and the war remains the nation’s number one issue; but neither the candidates nor th

Tuberculosis is a disease of the poor that thrives in crowded, unsanitary settings. Although it is still found in the United States in prisons and homeless shelters, by the 1980’s it had largely disappeared from the general population in the industrialized countries of the North. But now it ha

No one had to tell the delegates at the fourth annual convention of the Catholic Educational Association that Catholic schools aim to help their students become true Christians. But that is not all they are supposed to do. At the pontifical Mass that opened the meeting, held in Milwaukee, Wis., in J

The debate over Senator John Kerry’s service in the Vietnam War sounded a sour and dispiriting note as the presidential campaign of 2004 approached the Labor Day weekend, the traditional start of the final and most serious phase of the campaign. While President Bush prepared to accept the offi

The American story has been the “story of flawed and fallible people united across the generations by grand and enduring ideals,” said President George W. Bush in his inaugural address of Jan. 20, 2001. The theme of a united people also ran through the keynote speech of Illinois senatori