Of Many Things

We are launching a new segment in Dispatches, our traditional section for news. It’s called, appropriately enough, GoodNews, and will feature stories that I hope will give you some sense of the almost miraculous things that countless people of faith do every day around the world.

As is our annual custom, we republish excerpts from these texts here as an expression of our solidarity with the women and men who will march this month in the nation’s capital.

Each year, America’s editor in chief (yours truly in the present instance) will take an in-depth look at a public figure whose Catholic faith plays a meaningful role in his or her life and work.

We are either human beings, created in the image and likeness of God and endowed with moral agency and free will, or we are merely machines, programmed through laws and regulations, mere code written by the programmers.

No single person can be trusted to wield power; therefore, power must be shared among many and policed by a legal system of checks and balances.

“Each of the models brings out certain important and necessary points, but any model used in isolation will lead to distortions because each model exhibits only a particular reality” of the child of God and disciple of Jesus Christ who was Avery Dulles.