A Protestant pastor among my Facebook friends said he didn’t want to hear what anyone else was giving up for Lent. He was all for observing Lent, but he asked if people had forgotten Matthew 6. That’s the chapter in which Jesus tells people to act as if they weren’t fasting when they were. The

“We need to pray for our nation. We are in trouble,” Franklin Graham said in a Facebook post on Wednesday, posted before a mob encouraged by the president he has so faithfully served stormed the U.S. Capitol. “God’s judgment is coming, for the sins of our nation are great and they are a stench in

The minor pro-life leader John Rankin, who died on Christmas day, had a romantic idea of witness, but a more realistic and wiser view of politics than the mainstream leadership.  Someone you never heard of died on Christmas day. John Rankin was a pro-life leader deeply loved by the people who knew him, but one

Francis Cardinal Spellman made visiting the troops in the far east a Christmas tradition, but in 1966 he added to his work his endorsement of America’s goals in Vietnam, calling for “total victory.” Dorothy Day said he had dishonored God in denying the unity of man and the command to love one another. Christmas calls

She’s not truly pro-life. And she’s a bad Catholic to boot, and by her own standards. So say her critics. Several Facebook friends and others jumped on new Supreme Court Justice Amy Coney Barrett’s joining the majority of the court in lifting a stay of execution for Orlando Hall. He’d been sentenced to death in

David Mills remembers Anne Barbeau Gardiner, an accomplished scholar and his old friend, “a person who was completely herself.”  “I bet you didn’t expect me to look so frumpy,” she said when we first met, and laughed, loudly and disconcertingly. I had been thinking that her dress seemed to be made out of drape material.

Some guys tried to rob five 7/11s near her house, reports my friend and Chapter House colleague Leticia Ochoa Adams. Apparently not competently, since they ran away twice before getting anything. My question is: How do we know this wasn’t Leticia dealing with deadlines? “I was looking for inspiration,” Leticia said. She shrugged only her

David Mills remembers his friend, the famous convert and prodigious writer, Thomas Howard. The popular and in some cases almost idolized Catholic writer Thomas Howard has died, at the age of eighty-five. The scion of a major American Evangelical family — his older sister being the Evangelical superstar Elizabeth Elliot — he went to the

Running a cost / benefit analysis on the popular social media site and making adjustments accordingly might not be a bad idea. Among the contrarians, the braggarts, the enraged and the furious, the libelous, the concerned with their furrowed brows, the people who want you on their side and the people who assume you’re the

When one has the grace to live a strong experience of God, it is as if one is living an experience similar to that of the disciples during the Transfiguration:  a momentary foretaste of what will constitute the happiness of Paradise. These are usually brief experiences that are sometimes granted by God, especially prior to

There’s politics, and there’s electoral politics, & the two are different animals: not always as closely related as one might hope or expect. Probably the great majority of Americans who call themselves single-issue voters — those who treat the candidates’ views of abortion as the sole necessary criterion for voting for or against them —

On the true cost of cheap talk Talking about almost any issue can mean talking about other people’s faults, at least by implication. It’s like pushing your way through a crowd to get somewhere you need to get to quickly. You step on toes, often without realizing it. You can have impersonal arguments about ideas

Sometimes we need to speak ill of the dead. We may need to speak critically when the dead is a public figure whose memory his ideological allies use to promote their cause. When political people memorialize him in a way that establishes their favored political narrative. We must criticize to try to establish the truth. And as Catholics, we should be critical for another reason.

Ravi Zacharias, who died in May of last year, was American Evangelicalism’s superstar apologist. The movement’s flagship magazine, Christianity Today, headlined their recent report on him, “Ravi Zacharias Hid Hundreds of Pictures of Women, Abuse During Massages, and a Rape Allegation.” The story is worse than that. Southern Baptist leader Russell Moore called it “a pattern

These people cheat. They don't want to argue with you, so they make you out to be the bad guy. They do it in two different but very common ways, both of which I experienced in this discussion. Almost anyone who argues a position will have suffered them too.

It’s the ecumenical dog that doesn’t bark. We need him to bark, but he rarely does, and then he's quickly shushed. It’s the matter of conversion. When we pray for Christian unity, as we do this week, we pray not only for kindness and fellow-feeling and some very foggy idea of joining together in the future, after a gradual convergence somewhere in the middle. We pray for our separated brethren to give in.

She had her left leg on one of those little scooters people use when they’ve broken an ankle. She’d asked the clerk at St. Vincent de Paul to take a drip coffee maker out of the box. It was new, still in the wrapping, and cost about $2.00, maybe $3.00. Everything’s sold as is and

In this health emergency, every response has a downside: the only certainty is the human cost of what we do, or don’t.

You drive up the hill, through the narrow streets and short blocks of a typical working-class neighbourhood in an old eastern city. At the top, backed up against the ridge, sits a grey stone church that boasts more relics than any church outside the Vatican: some 5,000 of them, all told. A wealthy Belgian doctor,

The Index of Prohibited Books has a bad reputation today. But even 21st-century secularists suppress ideas they consider dangerous

It’s like the movement against smoking. The authorities decide that they must keep people from smoking for their own good. Many would ban it if they could, but they can’t, so they require scary warnings on packages, don’t let anyone smoke in public places, prevent sales to minors, restrict advertising and raise the price with