The Dispatch

Indifference is irresponsible

October 9, 2024 George Weigel 37

I can understand why many Americans seem dispirited about world affairs. Things are indeed a mess. What I cannot understand, however, is the electorate’s seeming indifference to the global mess: an indifference that manifests itself […]

The Dispatch

German “synodality” and the world Church

October 2, 2024 George Weigel 7

In a recent interview with The Pillar, Dr. Frank Ronge, a veteran German Catholic bureaucrat who coordinates the German Synodal Path, described the Synodaler Weg’s rationale and work. Many of those deeply engaged in the Synodal Path imagine it as […]

The Dispatch

Choking on Rights Talk

September 18, 2024 George Weigel 12

In her prescient book, Rights Talk: The Impoverishment of Political Discourse, Mary Ann Glendon of the Harvard Law School warned her fellow Americans in 1993 that our public life was being degraded by the promiscuous use of […]

The Dispatch

Canceled in China

September 11, 2024 George Weigel 10

“Hallow,” the prayer app that debuted in 2018, is one of the most popular spiritual tools on the planet, having been downloaded some 14 million times in over 150 countries, according to founder Alex Jones. […]

The Dispatch

“Sinicization” is not inculturation

August 28, 2024 George Weigel 9

“Inculturation” has been a Catholic buzzword for over a half-century. It’s not the most elegant neologism, smacking as it does of sociologese. Still, it expresses a truth of Catholic missionary practice two millennia old: the […]

The Dispatch

When was baseball’s Golden Age?

August 21, 2024 George Weigel 19

Amidst a presidential campaign in which many of our countrymen deplore the choices we face in November, let’s take a break, follow the counsel of Ecclesiastes 3:1 (“For everything there is a season…”), and turn […]

The Dispatch

Potholes on the road to Synod 2024

August 7, 2024 George Weigel 27

The ecclesiastical propaganda machine created for last October’s Synod on Synodality for a Synodal Church is still grinding away, and it’s getting both tiresome and worrisome. As for tiresome: Cardinal Jean-Claude Hollerich, SJ, the General […]