The Justice Department praised a Maryland county council for protecting the First Amendment rights of protesters and said it now expects them to extend the same protections to religious gatherings

While the coronavirus has put our lives, as individuals and families, on hold, it is acting as an acc­elerant in global politics. Trends that would have taken decades to play out will now take months, as the virus courses through the veins of the world system searching out morbidities to latch onto and amplify. Like

I have discovered in my life that there are many forms of isolation, confusion and loss. While I reflect on parental death, marital breakdown and estranged friendships as the most intense, there is a competitor. It is a particular form of academic crisis. One moment stands out. I was studying for my PhD at the

On the third day of looting, my train into New York arrives five hours late. We pull into a deserted Penn Station a few minutes after 10.30. I have just enough time to walk home before the first curfew in many years goes into effect. People on social media have been cheering the looters. Some

Already, the lockdown has turned out to be an opportunity for new kinds of service. Heidi Witte used to lead Children’s Liturgy of the Word at her parish. Since the new regulations, Witte told the Catholic Herald, she and her husband Mark, a post-production manager, have been creating video sessions for children. At first, these

Almost 23 years ago, Hong Kong was handed over to China with the promise of a “high degree of autonomy”, basic freedoms and the possibility of universal suffrage at some stage in the future. It was an experiment devised by China’s paramount leader Deng Xiaoping known as “one country, two systems”, and was supposed to

This text is adapted from a speech delivered at the Augustine Collective Conference on January 24, 2020. The Augustine Collective is a programme of the Veritas Forum, which seeks to help students and faculty ask life’s hardest questions. The speech is published with permission of the Veritas Forum. On any given day, a quick glance

After Life Netflix It was hard not to feel some admiration for Ricky Gervais’s speech at the Golden Globes this year, when he took Hollywood celebrities to task for rank hypocrisy. On the woke posturing of the same A-Listers who work for ethically dubious corporations, Gervais commented: “If ISIS started a streaming service, you’d call

I miss God. I miss Jesus Christ in the Euchar­ist. I wish I could tell you that the lockdown, and the suspension of public masses in the Archdiocese of New York, have proved spiritually fruitful for me: an extended Lent, a long journey into a spiritual desert that would allow the spiritually adept to take

Whether one is in the world of commercial corporate governance or that of ecclesiastical governance, the naked notion of “efficiency” is – as the saying goes – a good servant but a terrible master. It is especially dangerous when powerful figures mistake efficiency for a ruling principle. That’s one reason why the words of the

One of the curious things about English law is that really important case law is based on apparent trivialities. For instance, the present law of negligence and liability was based on a 1932 case involving a bottle of ginger beer containing a disintegrating snail. And many of the cases I do as Judge Rinder in

In February, the Pontifical Academy for Life helped to host a conference on the ethics of AI, at the end of which a statement was issued, the Rome Call for AI Ethics. Following that, a team from leading universities, along with the president and officials of the Pontifical Academy for Life, have penned an article