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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 …
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9/26/24
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“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 …
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9/19/24
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My hands were shaky a quarter-century ago as I carried the heavy box from the front door of our house into my study. Inside were my author copies of “Witness to Hope”, the first volume of …
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9/12/24
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The Catholic Campaign for Human Development (CCHD), rhetorically oversold as the “U.S. Church’s anti-poverty program” – Do no other such programs exist? – was an …
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8/22/24
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The Catechism of the Catholic Church says some interesting things about charity, the supreme theological virtue that, as St. Paul wrote in Colossians 3:14, “binds everything together in perfect …
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8/8/24
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In the days before Pope Paul VI simplified the rituals surrounding the creation of new cardinals, men who had previously been informed that they had been chosen gathered in Rome; there, a day or so …
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6/27/24
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WARSAW — John Williams, 92-year-old laureate conductor of the Boston Pops Orchestra, has composed some of the most memorable pop-orchestral music of our time, including the themes for Star …
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6/6/24
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ROME. Age certainly accelerates one’s sense of the passage of time. Well do I remember high school classes that felt as long as Würm Glaciation, the minute hand circumambulating the …
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5/30/24
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Among the many urgent questions raised by the Synods on the Family in 2014 and 2015 and the current Synod on Synodality – questions that will inevitably bear on the next papal conclave – …
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5/23/24
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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 …
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5/16/24
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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 …
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4/25/24
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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 …
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4/4/24
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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 the 11th …
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3/28/24
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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 …
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3/21/24
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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 …
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3/14/24
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Two years ago, Russian forces attempted a Hitlerian blitzkrieg in Ukraine. According to Russian dictator Vladimir Putin, its goal was to eradicate Ukraine: both the Ukrainian state and the Ukrainian …
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3/5/24
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When I first met Yigal Carmon in November 1988, he was counter-terrorism adviser to Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir, a position he held under Shamir’s successor, Yitzhak Rabin, until …
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2/15/24
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My friend and colleague Carl Trueman recently observed that “the West is no longer a consortium of serious cultures.” To which I am sorely tempted to add, “…or serious …
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2/1/24
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In the apostolic letter Ad Theologiam Promovendam (To Promote Theology), issued by Pope Francis on Nov. 1, 2023, the Church was urged to do theology contextually: as the motu proprio put it, theology …
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1/18/24
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Advent-2023 is as short as Advent can be, so this annual column on Christmas gift books that will inspire, entertain, inform, or all of the above comes a bit earlier than usual; it also includes …
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12/14/23
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