Washington, D.C.: My Boyhood Olympus
To someone who grew up in the Washington of the 1940s and 50s, the city is unrecognizable one minute, but in the next, it is the same as it always was: corrupt, yet sacred — a rascally and fallible and enchanted place: a city built low to the ground, spacious and full of trees and obscurely haunted.
If You Don’t Find Your Identity in a Family, You’ll Look For It in the Primal Screams of Identity Politics
The ascent of identity politics reveals that people are having an identity crisis, and they are having an identity crisis because the sexual revolution resulted in family—and, by extension, individual—breakdown.
Ruin or Renewal? Thoughts on America’s Third Century
Our political contests are increasingly bitter and render normal political decision making impossible. It is tempting, but wrong, to assume that past will be prologue, that our current divisions are temporary and will fade in short order.
Abuse on the Margins
Sexual abuse is a plague no matter where it occurs or to whom. But one of the underexplored facets of the clerical sexual abuse crisis in the United States is the way in which marginalized and minority communities have proven particularly susceptible both to abusers themselves and to the malfeasance of bishops and religious superiors who mishandled reports of abuse.
