Henry J. Hyde, R.I.P.
By George Weigel
Posted: Friday, January 4, 2008
Henry Hyde was the most consequential Catholic legislator of his time, a man who loved the U.S. House of Representatives and who was, in turn, well-loved by its members, Republican and Democrat alike. By all accounts, he was the most brilliant extemporaneous debater in living memory, and while his comments could be sharp, they never drew blood, for Henry was, at heart, a gentle man.  [Read More]

Books for Christmas
By George Weigel
Posted: Tuesday, December 18, 2007
A year ago, the formidable Dorothy Rabinowitz asked me for a Christmastide Wall Street Journal column, to be dubbed the "Five Best Books on Christianity." I suggested Matthew, Mark, Luke, John, and Acts; Dorothy demurred.  [Read More]

Among the Fallen
By George Weigel
Posted: Thursday, December 13, 2007
Judged by the standards of a century replete with political slaughter, the Spanish Civil War of 1936-39 can seem a relatively tame affair. Tens of millions died in Stalin's Ukrainian hunger famine, the Holocaust, Mao's Great Leap Forward, and Pol Pot's Cambodian killing fields; the civil war in Spain managed a mere 500,000 killed.  [Read More]

Blessed Franz, At Last
By George Weigel
Posted: Thursday, December 6, 2007
When Hitler's Anschluss led to Austria's incorporation into the Third Reich, Jaegerstaetter, alone in his village, protested. Too many Austrian Catholics welcomed the new order with enthusiasm, voting in large numbers for incorporation into Nazi Germany; Jaegerstaetter wrote that "what took place in the spring of 1938 was not much different from what happened that Holy Thursday 1,900 years ago when the crowd was given a free choice between the innocent Savior and the criminal Barabbas."  [Read More]

Civility, Charity and Truth-Telling
By George Weigel
Posted: Wednesday, November 28, 2007
Thoughtful Americans across the spectrum of political opinion are rightly concerned about the degree to which our national politics has degenerated into the manipulation of consumer desires and passions, often by the seductions of the electronic media.  [Read More]

A Disappointing Call for Dialogue
By George Weigel
Posted: Thursday, November 15, 2007
Genuine dialogue requires a precise focus, and a commitment by the dialogue partners to condemn by name those members of their communities who murder in the name of God. It is unfortunate that "A Common Word" took us no closer to cementing either of these building blocks of genuine dialogue into place.  [Read More]

China's One-Child Self-Destruction
By George Weigel
Posted: Thursday, November 8, 2007
Because of the One-Child Policy and its skewing effects on the overall Chinese population, "China's age profile will be 'graying' in the decades ahead at a pace almost never before seen in human history." Today, China is young; by 2030, China will be "grayer" than the United States.  [Read More]

Revisiting the Modernist Wars
By George Weigel
Posted: Thursday, November 1, 2007
Benedict XV began his pontificate by trying to stop the civil war within the Church over Modernism, which his predecessor Pius X had condemned in the 1907 encyclical Pascendi as "the synthesis of all heresies."  [Read More]

Camelot Revisited
By George Weigel
Posted: Wednesday, October 24, 2007
John F. Kennedy would now be 90 years old -- a circumstance virtually impossible to imagine, for those of us alive on November 22, 1963. When Lee Harvey Oswald's bullets killed the 35th president of the United States, our memories of him were frozen in a kind of memorial amber.  [Read More]

Why Cooking Counts
By George Weigel
Posted: Wednesday, October 17, 2007
My mentor, as I discovered the theological romance of cooking, was Anglican priest and author Robert Farrar Capon, whose book, The Supper of the Lamb (Modern Library) was aptly described by New York Times food maven Craig Claiborne as "one of the funniest, wisest, and most unorthoox cookbooks ever written."   [Read More]