GETHSEMANE
That same cry rose across fields at Antietam, Those wounded boys so far from home
St. Paul Reflects
Still, Stephen’s face invades my stupors
Review: Thomas More, God’s good servant
Joanne Paul wrote her powerful and considerable biography of Thomas More because she finds More’s life relevant to today’s world. But the book also addresses another question: Was More a saintly martyr or a vicious murderer?
Review: Seeking a healthy planet and a healthy church
In Christina Rivera’s new collection, we wander through waves of connections, an ebb and flow carrying us between climate change, the sixth extinction, motherhood, all kinds of oceans and personal challenges—including the writer’s desire to leave the Catholic Church she was raised in.
Review: A Jesuit high school whodunit
Anna Bruno’s ‘Fine Young People,’ set at St. Ignatius, an elite Jesuit high school in a Pittsburgh suburb, operates as a whodunit on multiple levels simultaneously.
Review: Parables of a Greenland priest
Henrik Pontoppidan’s ‘The White Bear’ gives us two novellas that work in conversation with each other. Both feature burly, uncouth protagonists who endure episodes of childhood trauma and develop a fiercely independent way of engaging with the world.
Review: Molly McNett and making the unsayable sayable
Molly McNett’s ‘Child of These Tears’ displays the difficulties of translation, the irreducibility of meaning, and the frustrating limitations of human nature and society.
Review: Bennett Cerf, Random House co-founder and superstar editor
Gayle Feldman’s new biography of Bennett Cerf, ‘Nothing Random,’ is a window into the past of American literary culture.
How to build a faith that’s sturdy enough for real life
What does joy mean when life contradicts it? In the Christian context, it is a “crucified joy,” on that does not deny suffering but rejoices in the triumph of love over death and loss.
Why one diocese radically changed its approach to Confirmation
In 2025 the Archdiocese of Baltimore changed the confirmation age from between 14 and 16 to the age of 9. Can the move combat rising rates of disaffiliation?
Our readers on the moral resistance to Trump’s ‘politics of rage’
“The federal government’s approach is out of all proportion to the scope of the problem of a small percentage of undocumented immigrants that have committed crimes.”
We are all in danger if we ignore the climate crisis
The moral catastrophe of the Trump administration’s reversal on climate policy is even more significant than its strategic and economic shortsightedness.
36 years as a Vatican journalist: papal apologies, a pillow fight and the people of God
While each pope said and did things that inspired me or puzzled me or challenged me or disappointed me, so did other Catholics.
Sheed & Ward: the unlikely power couple who revolutionized Catholic publishing
As readers mark the centennial of the Sheed & Ward publishing house, we celebrate what “the Sheedwardians”—as that unlikely Catholic power couple sometimes called themselves—meant back in their heyday.
I regret supporting the Iraq War. We shouldn’t repeat our mistakes in Iran now.
With the benefit of hindsight, it is easy to see that the pope was far more clear-eyed than the politicians who opted for war in Iraq and the Catholic thinkers who helped provide the war’s putative justification.
Four years of war: ‘The Ukrainian Catholic Church is wiped out every time there is Russian aggression.’
Four years into the war, when Russian attacks on the power grid in the middle of a brutal winter have caused suffering for millions, the needs are as urgent as ever. For Ukrainian refugees in the United States, uncertainty is the word of the day.
The ICE surge in Minnesota is winding down. Is Arizona next?
After border czar Tom Homan announced last week that the Trump administration would end its immigration enforcement surge in Minnesota, some local religious and community leaders in Arizona are asking themselves if their state is next.
The church in Spain wins an immigration victory after ‘royal decree’ offers amnesty to 500,000
As hostility toward immigrants in Europe and the United States is on the rise, Spain stands out as one of the few states that remains welcoming to migrants.
Jesuits struggle with fallout from Trump policies on aid, immigration and deportation
Trump administration policies on humanitarian aid, immigration and mass deportation “have human afterlives, and they end up affecting communities; they end up affecting lives,” says Marco Gómez, S.J., the country director of Fe y Alegría in Panama. “These decisions, taken far away, are affecting concrete and real people.”
As the son of a cop who took a costly stand, I can say to ICE agents: You can say no.
My father was a New York police officer. When he was ordered to raid gay bars and arrest patrons, he decided he could not do it.
George Saunders loves telling ghost stories
George Saunders’s place among the best living American writers is secure. And while Saunders is not often included in discussions of the best Catholic writers, in both his upbringing and his thematic concerns, his work fits solidly in the Catholic literary tradition.
Faith
To understand Christian hospitality, look to the host
For the Christian, the matter of hospitality would seem to be straightforward, a given. But lately, the word hospitality sums up the challenge of discipleship.
Measuring Pope Francis’ legacy one year after his death
Among all the news articles I have read in the past couple of years, I am not ungrateful that one poignant, below-the-fold story has remained with me, a glow-in-the-dark star stuck to a ceiling. When Pope Francis visited Indonesia in September 2024, The New York Times reported about a group of transgender women in South…
How the Sisters of Mercy are fighting homelessness from coast to coast
“I feel like I meet Jesus in those people that I meet on the street every day,” said Luz Eugenia Alvarez, R.S.M.
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