Abu Ghraib and Just War in Iraq
By George Weigel
Posted: Tuesday, July 13, 2004
The virtually universal American revulsion at photographs showing abuse of Iraqi prisoners by U.S. troops tells us something important about this country – something that can’t be reduced to the old saw about a picture being worth a thousand words. The revulsion tells us that, despite the moral confusions of our culture, most Americans are not moral cynics.  [Read More]

The Activist Trap
As Election Day draws near, Benedict's warning to his flock is timely and relevant.
By Colleen Carroll Campbell
Posted: Thursday, August 31, 2006
Those who believe most fervently in the socially transformative power of personal responsibility and personal conversion and in the existence of universal moral laws cannot expect to change the world through external activity and political victories alone. Their hope must lie in something deeper and more enduring, in the transcendent truths that can only be discovered in silence, solitude, and contemplation.  [Read More]

Adding Spice to the American Mix
By George Weigel
Posted: Friday, April 18, 2008
For the life of the Catholic Church in America, what the Pope says in his homilies in Washington and New York, and in his meetings with Catholic bishops, educators, priests, Religious, seminarians and young people will likely have more of an immediate impact than what he says from the green marble rostrum of the General Assembly. And what the Catholic Church in America most needs to hear from Benedict XVI is a word of encouragement.  [Read More]

Adult Interreligious Dialogue
By George Weigel
Posted: Sunday, November 30, 2008
Father Christian Troll, a German Jesuit, is one of the Catholic Church's leading students of Islam and a key figure in the Catholic-Islamic dialogue launched by Pope Benedict XVI's September 2006 Regensburg Lecture. Speaking recently at Cambridge University, Father Troll laid out a series of questions that must be faced in any serious conversation between Catholics and Muslims  [Read More]

Afraid of Change? More Myths of 1968
By George Weigel
Posted: Wednesday, June 7, 2006
In a recent editorial on condoms and AIDS, the London-based Tablet, an influential weekly in the Catholic Anglosphere, argued that "in 1968, the most persuasive reason advanced in favor of retaining the ban on artificial birth control was that to lift it would suggest that the Church could change its mind, and hence undermine its teaching authority." That is a distortion of history and the editors of the Tablet -- which played a large role in the Humanae Vitae controversy -- should know it.  [Read More]

After Twenty Years: A Jesuit Self-Critique
By George Weigel
Posted: Wednesday, March 6, 2002
Twenty years ago, Pope John Paul II took the unprecedented step of appointing a “personal delegate” to govern the Society of Jesus. It was an attempt at papal shock therapy, aimed at getting the Church’s largest and most prestigious religious order of men to reflect critically on the path they had taken since the Second Vatican Council. Ever since the Jesuits’ normal governance was re-established in 1983, defenders and critics of the Pope’s intervention have both wondered just how successful the shock therapy had been.  [Read More]

Against the Grain
Christianity and Democracy, War and Peace
By George Weigel
Posted: Tuesday, July 29, 2008
Cutting against the grain of conventional wisdom, New York Times bestseller, George Weigel, offers a compelling look at the ways in which Catholic social teaching sheds light on the challenges of peace, the problem of pluralism, the quest for human rights, and the defense of liberty.  [Read More]

The Alito Apologies
By George Weigel
Posted: Wednesday, March 1, 2006
With Justice Samuel A. Alito, Jr., safely and, I trust, happily, seated on the United States Supreme Court, apologies are in order -- as they frequently are after these judicial confirmation brawls.   [Read More]

Allam & Allah
A war of ideas.
By George Weigel
Posted: Tuesday, March 25, 2008
Magdi Allam has courageously defended the religious freedom of all while sharply criticizing those currents of thought in Islam which would deny the right of religious conversion to Muslims. Now he fights the war of ideas from a different foxhole, so to speak.  [Read More]

American Ideals Can Be Lost If They Aren't Taught
By Colleen Carroll Campbell
Posted: Friday, June 20, 2008
Critics often deride American-identity worries as mere nativism or naiveté. But a new report from the Milwaukee-based Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation suggests that our concerns are justified. And our anxiety over losing outward markers of our national identity may be linked to our increasingly tenuous grasp of the ideals that define us as Americans.  [Read More]