2026
Our Untouchables – The Catholic Thing
We pride ourselves on the fact that we don’t have a “caste system” in America, with higher and lower castes and those at the bottom who are “untouchables.” I sometimes wonder, though, whether we have something analogous in the way we distinguish…
Holy Work: Michelangelo’s ‘Pietà’ – The Catholic Thing
“The sculptor arrives at his end by taking away what is superfluous.”– Michelangelo to Benedetto Varchi, 1549 The greatest artist of the Renaissance is famous for something he may never have said: “I saw the angel in the marble and carved until…
Blessed Is He Who Mourns
All of Lent is an exercise in holy sorrow. We don’t know how to mourn as we ought – especially not our sins. So, we need these 40 days of penitence, to train us how to be sorrowful in the proper way. We need to learn genuine contrition. How not…
Scott Hahn and His Happy Band of Convert Brothers
The feast day of the newest Doctor of the Church, John Henry Newman, is not his dies natalis (death) but 9th October, the day of his conversion in 1845. That date was definitive for the shape of the Catholic Church in England. So much good for…
The Nine Billion Names of God
Science is an odd theme to choose on the brink of Holy Week. Or maybe not so odd. In a way, science is miraculous. It’s an expression of man’s dignity and genius. It offers our species two deep satisfactions: the joy of discovering how the…
Catholics and “Surveillance Capitalism” – The Catholic Thing
A correct Catholic approach to AI becomes clearer, I think, if we approach a foundational text in Catholic Social Teaching, Rerum novarum, not as about structural issues in political economy, but rather as about claims on time and claims of…
‘The Deepest Reality of the Greatest Event Ever to Take Place’
For Lent this year, I resolved to pray the Angelus in the morning, at midday, and in the evening – a practice, of course, long a part of Catholic piety. In my adult life, I’ve been up and down in adhering to this practice, and this year I wanted…
Double-Lives in the ‘Naked Public Square’
I take the subway to work. I like doing that because it gives me uninterrupted time to do things. Read. I get at least two books done per month. Write. Some of those book reviews get sketched out on the Orange Line. Pray. The trip to work can…
Thoughts about War in a Lenten Season
Let’s begin with a pointed question: Are we, almost all, today, Sadducees? If your knowledge of the groups who appear in the New Testament is hazy, we might put it thus: Do almost all of us now, even Christians who claim otherwise, like the…
Awake, O Sleeper and Rise
As we mark our head, lips, and heart with the Sign of the Cross when the Gospel is solemnly proclaimed at Mass, we signal, by that prayer made with hands, the desire that the living Word of God will touch and convert mind and heart, that we may…