After Neil Armstrong stepped foot on the Moon in July 1969, America’s editors called the effort to reach the Moon “so much a symbol and product of human unity as to argue its distinctively religious character in itself.”
History
Posted inEditorials, Faith
Repentance and Holiness: The True Meaning of Lent
That the Lord seeks not to punish us for our sins but to call us all back to holiness is a conviction so strong among theologians in the church in the modern age that it risks becoming a truism.
Posted inPolitics & Society, Your Take
Reckoning with the church’s record on slavery: Our readers respond
Read the responses to Christopher J. Kellerman, S.J., on the Catholic Church’s history with slavery. Comments were gathered from the online version of the article.
Posted inArts & Culture, Books
Review: When Botticelli illustrated Dante
With ‘Botticelli’s Secret: The Lost Drawings and the Rediscovery of the Renaissance,’ Joseph Luzzi has written a fascinating narrative that tells the story of the drawings and seeks to revise our understanding of the phenomenon traditionally known as the Renaissance.
Posted inFaith, Vantage Point
From 1919: President Éamon de Valera on Ireland’s right to independence
In advance of a visit to the United States in 1919, Irish patriot and politician Éamon de Valera argued in America’s pages that Ireland deserved full independence from England.
Posted inPodcasts, Politics & Society
Podcast: How should Catholic institutions make reparations for the sin of slavery?
Laura Masur joins “The Gloria Purvis Podcast” this week to talk about her work recovering fragments of Black American history from what she calls “sites of memory” or places where enslaved persons dwelled, often in Catholic-run institutions.
Posted inArts & Culture, Catholic Book Club
Remembering John Hope Franklin, the premier historian of the Black experience
John Hope Franklin wrote of the African American struggle for justice for seven decades. At his death, he was called “the first great American historian to reckon the price owed in violence, autocracy and militarism.”
Posted inArts & Culture, Theater
Oscar Isaac and Rachel Brosnahan bring love and revolution to life in ‘The Sign in Sidney Brustein’s Window’
A lovingly crafted new revival of “The Sign in Sidney Brustein’s Window” at the Brooklyn Academy of Music makes a fresh case for reconsideration of Lorraine Hansberry’s less well-known second play, which followed the classic “A Raisin in the Sun.”
Posted inFaith, The Good Word
Ash Wednesday: a great idea about what’s right with us
History and Ash Wednesday illustrate a mutual truth: Ideas are much easier to suggest than to suppress.
Posted inArts & Culture, Interviews
The Irish priest who outwitted the Nazis
My Father’s House centers on Monsignor Hugh O’Flaherty, a real life Irish priest who, with the help of an electic group of accomplices, helped shuttle escaped prisoners of war captives to safety.