On September 5, 1977, “Voyager 1,” built by NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, was launched from Cape Canaveral atop a Titan IIIE rocket. It’s still going, almost forty-seven years later and some 15 billion miles away: […]
When the always well-written and often wrongheaded New Yorker dislikes something, chances are good that I’ll like it – a principle that holds, with certain reservations, in the case of Dignitas Infinita, the April 8 “Declaration of the Dicastery for […]
In Jesus of Nazareth–Holy Week, Pope Benedict XVI remarked on the striking parallel between the presence of the holy women at the cross of Christ and their role in the first appearances of the Risen Lord: […]
One of my life’s great blessings has been to have known and worked with men and women whose books I first studied in college and graduate school. High on that roster of intellectual-mentors-become-friends-and-colleagues stands the […]
What came first: Creation, or God’s covenants with the People of Israel and the New Israel, the Church? The question may seem odd, even silly. Chronologically, it’s obvious that the divine act of creation preceded […]
Twenty-four years ago this week, I was in Jerusalem to cover Pope John Paul II’s epic pilgrimage to the Holy Land for NBC. After going to the Church of the Holy Sepulchre to pray at […]
In the course of an insightful essay on Vladimir Putin’s challenge to civilization, Italian historian Roberto de Mattei, observed that, amidst the general decline of the West, “the Church…. appears as a wasteland.” That certainly […]
His neighbors in 1940s Oklahoma would have found it hard to imagine the boy they knew as Stanley Francis Rother as a future martyr, and the first beatified American parish priest. Young Stan did reasonably […]
Dean Acheson, U.S. secretary of state from 1949 until 1953, is buried in Washington’s Oak Hill Cemetery. When I read recently that Acheson’s 20th successor, Antony Blinken, had sent a cable subtitled “Gender Identity Best […]
The traditional Lenten practices of intensified prayer, fasting, and almsgiving are spiritual disciplines to be followed along the six-week pilgrimage from Ash Wednesday to the Easter Triduum. As I suggested in Roman Pilgrimage: The Station […]
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