Parsing the pros and cons of ‘A Canticle for Leibowitz,’ the latest selection of the Catholic Book Club.
History
Posted inFaith, News Analysis
Boris Johnson had every right to be married in the Catholic Church.
While the optics of Boris Johnson’s marriage in a Catholic church this weekend suggest a double standard, in fact the church seems to be treating him the same it would any divorced Catholic seeking to remarry.
Posted inArts & Culture, Books
What an Italian Jesuit (and Georgetown’s ‘second founder’) thought about democracy and religious freedom in America
A Jesuit and an Italian, Giovanni Grassi, S.J., undertook a project to explain the United States to other Italians in 1818.
Posted inArts & Culture, Books
Review: The unexpected collaboration between President Kennedy and Henry Cabot Lodge Jr.
In ‘The Last Brahmin,’ Luke Nichter presents Henry Cabot Lodge Jr. as a man who, from cradle to grave, loved his family and his country, the ideals of both of which he tried to live up to his entire life.
Posted inFaith, Faith and Reason
‘Rerum Novarum’ is 130 years old. What would Leo XIII say about today’s gig economy?
An an important anniversary of Pope Leo XIII’s famous encyclical on workers’ rights, a look at how ‘Rerum Novarum’ applies to the vagaries of our new economy.
Posted inArts & Culture, Books
A New Orleans jazz hall and its history in the fight for Black freedom
In post-Civil War New Orleans, Creole leaders won elections and oversaw the desegregation of public schools, a short-lived experiment destroyed after Reconstruction.
Posted inPolitics & Society, Short Take
Walter Mondale was a decent man who knew how to laugh at himself. We need more politicians like him.
Walter F. Mondale was the embodiment of a kind of decency and civility that has all but disappeared from the American political scene.
Posted inArts & Culture, Ideas
Fifty years ago, my father leaked the Pentagon Papers to The New York Times. It changed his life — and mine.
Half a century later, Robert Ellsberg looks back on his father’s famous release of the Pentagon Papers—and the consequences of that decision for his father, for him and for the nation.
Posted inFaith, Short Take
The Catholic priest who refused a lifeboat rescue: A forgotten story from the sinking of the Titanic
On the 109th anniversary of the sinking of the Titanic, Ashley Herzog writes about the last moments of Father Thomas Byles, who ministered to Catholic passengers and is being proposed for sainthood.
Posted inFaith, Of Many Things
What we can learn from Prince Philip’s extraordinary life
Prince Philip once described himself as “a discredited Balkan prince of no particular merit or distinction.” Self-deprecation, of course, was one of his famous traits. But there were others, which point to some of the lessons to be gleaned from his extraordinary life.