Francis X. Maier

A vast amount of ink has been spilled in recent years arguing for “diversity” and “tolerance” in American society. Some of these arguments are admirable and sincere. Some are cynical and vindictive. The latter applies in Philadelphia.

I’ve been dreading this November for the past year. In half a century of voting, I’ve been worried or frustrated by our public life many times. But 2020 has a unique toxicity, as if the whole nation were heaving, rudderless, on an ocean of poisonous blame.

The current pontificate’s outreach to China is, for Mr. Lai Chee Ying, fatally flawed at the expense of China’s Christian believers.

What’s missing in Raised by Wolves, as in so much of modern science fiction, is precisely anything resembling or ennobling the human soul.

Rod Dreher’s new book seeks first to explain what’s reshaping American culture and why; and then to suggest the strategies needed today to live and witness Christian hope, despite the changing terrain.

Taking account of the challenges facing the Church in the third millennium, and drawing lessons from the pontificates of John Paul II, Benedict XVI, and Francis, George Weigel systematically outlines the qualities needed in the next successor of Peter in his new book The Next Pope.

Whatever the fury and turmoil of our times might be, it’s who we love, what we love, and how well we love that determines our destination.

Healthy families anchor healthy societies and are, in their essence, anti-totalitarian. In like manner, attacks on a healthy society at the macro level—the congealing of economic and political power in a minority elite, for example—inevitably cripple the family on a micro level and result in a poisoned civic life.

Today’s lack of first-rank creative talents like Georges Bernanos, the French Catholic novelist and essayist who died in 1948, is a deficit for the Church.  It’s also a sign, in much of the “developed” world, of her seeming infertility.

A new TV production of Brave New World offers a mildly absorbing science fiction tale with lots of glistening flesh and technology. As an adaptation of Aldous Huxley’s sobering message, though, it fails.

That the ghost of Walter Duranty still has his Pulitzer Prize is an obscenity that warriors of the cancel culture may want to address.

Henri de Lubac, S.J., understood the human predicament, the grandeur of God’s love, and the beauty of the Church with extraordinary clarity and fidelity.