I’ve not been fully sure what to “make” of Pope Francis. He is clearly a man of God with a deep love for the poor and an even deeper personal humility. But how is one to respond to his pronouncements on economic and environmental issues? Pope Francis and the Caring Society, ed. Robert M. Whaples (Independent [...]
The floodwaters of Hurricane Harvey washed away the dividing lines of race, religion, and class, revealing character and the basic decency at the core of what it means to be human. What makes Houston’s heart beat most truly is faith in God… Hurricane Harvey revealed the huge heart of Houston through the biggest natural disaster [...]
Our experience escaping the hurricane taught me that as God's children, all men are truly brothers. I saw the face of Jesus many times in the faces of our rescuers: people of widely differing life experiences, and of various colors and faiths. You millions, I embrace you. This kiss is for all the world! Brothers, [...]
The soft totalitarian roots of Prime Minister Trudeau’s Liberal government are becoming increasingly transparent through its dismissing of the central truth that builds up society: the life of every person must be safeguarded and protected… Terezín. Auschwitz-Birkenau. Majdanek. Treblinka. These places of suffering, even their very names, signify what Eva Hoffman calls the “abrupt but [...]
Probably few who passed my grandmother on the street would have thought of her as a “great woman.” Yet I would beg to differ. Not that anyone is passing her now. At least if they are, they are more than unaware of it. She passed away from this world into the next more than eleven [...]
In the 1980s I served as the vicar of country parish of Brading on the Isle of Wight in England. One of my predecessors was The Rev’d Christian William Hampton Weekes—known affectionately as Hampy. Born in 1880 and educated at Charterhouse and Trinity College, Cambridge, he was the Vicar of Brading from 1935 to his [...]
More than twenty-five years ago, in The Closing of the American Mind, Allan Bloom pointed out that college students in the United States had become very “nice.” Students in general did not want to offend anyone and there was a constant concern to protect one another’s feelings. Bloom meant this as a half-hearted, even backhanded [...]
Last Tuesday evening, I saw ‘Of Gods and Men’ at the only theater in Cincinnati showing the excellent French film, based on a 1995 true story. There were only three other people in the theater with me, and none of them cried like I did during the latter half of the movie. The monks’ triumphs [...]