After years of negative votes in Congress and the opposition of the American people, on Oct. 21 Barack Obama allowed the first Mexican truck to cross the border at Laredo, Texas, and head north to deliver door-to-door service of its industrial equipment. This was implemented by an agreement quietly signed by Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood … Read more
About a decade before he began a Nashville recording career that has included five platinum albums, Collin Raye was singing at a nightclub in Beaverton, Ore., when he experienced something he would later recognize as an act of Providence. There was a couple that came every weekend to see him perform. “As I was … Read more
With its divine foundation, sanction, and mission, nothing could be more glorious than the Catholic Church. But, of course, many people — even many baptized Catholics — don’t see it that way. Yet when the sins of men — secular material progress, or our own self-centeredness — blind us to this, they blind us to everything. The Renaissance, a … Read more
The real scandal in the accusations against Herman Cain is the corruption of the law, the media and politics. Let’s start with the law. Some people may think the fact that the National Restaurant Association reportedly paid $45,000 to settle a claim made by one of its employees against Mr. Cain is incriminating. Most … Read more
For many years now, Catholics across America have been asked by their local parishes to contribute to a variety of causes, mostly to help the less fortunate. As Catholics we are called to live the gospel and to practice the corporal works of mercy. This includes aiding those who are in need of basic necessities: … Read more
The hero of Evelyn Waugh’s Scott-King’s Modern Europe is a classics teacher who has lived into a time when classics are regarded as irrelevant and useless. He is told that parents no longer want the school to produce the “complete man” but to qualify their sons to enter the modern world. Can he blame them? … Read more
Although he’s not very well known in the U.S., save among members of the Sant’Egidio community (of which he’s the founding father), Andrea Riccardi is a major figure in the Catholic Church in Italy: a historian of the papacy, a commentator on all things Catholic, and a player in various ecclesiastical dramas. Most recently, according … Read more
Presenting his fiscal plan in USA Today last week, Mitt Romney said he wants to “eliminate every government program that is not absolutely essential.” That sounds good until you realize that Romney’s goal of cutting $500 billion from projected federal outlays in 2016 would, at best, leave the budget about 8 percent higher than it … Read more
Predicting the future is a tricky business but that does not stop people from trying, economists in particular. While skilled at dissecting the current state of affairs, they are fallible when predicting where it will lead. The year now ending is a good example. It began on a note of high optimism after an … Read more
Who is the Tolstoy of the Zulus? The Proust of the Papuans? I’d be glad to read him. – Saul Bellow. In asking about the Papuan Proust, novelist Saul Bellow summed up the core problem with the twin idols of our age, Multiculturalism and Diversity. For the ideology of Multiculturalism—now dominant on most college … Read more
Many Wall Street occupiers are echoing the Communist Party USA’s call to “Save the nation! Tax corporations! Tax the rich!” There are other Americans, on both the left and the right — for example, President Barack Obama and House Speaker John Boehner — who call for reductions in corporate taxes. But the University of California, … Read more
Friday, thousands in Moscow, giving Nazi salutes and carrying placards declaring, “Russia for the Russians!” marched through the city shouting racial slurs against peoples from the Caucasus. In Nigeria, Boko Haram, which is Hausa for “Western education is sacrilege,” massacred 63 people in a terror campaign to bring about sharia law. Seven churches were … Read more
Whittaker Chambers: A Biography, Sam Tanenhaus, Modern Library, 1998, 638 pages, $20 It was early December 1948, and Congressman Richard Nixon was in the midst of the first of his “six crises.” For the moment this particular crisis was in recess, and a supremely satisfied Nixon was posing for pictures. In his hands was … Read more
One of the things that has struck me, when I have gone on luxury cruise ships, is that most of the passengers look like they are older than the captain — and luxury cruise ships don’t have juveniles as captains. The reason for the elderly clientele is fairly simple: Most people don’t reach the … Read more
Herman Cain, beleaguered by charges of sexual harassment, was all over Washington last week — an odd choice of venue, considering that the Iowa precinct caucuses are now just 58 days away and the New Hampshire primary 65. But as I learned when I sat next to Cain Friday morning during a long-scheduled taping … Read more
The sense of religious liberty is being lost in America, warned Archbishop José H. Gomez in a recent article. Writing in the On the Square section of the Web site of the magazine First Things, his Oct. 25 piece noted that both courts and government agencies are increasingly overriding conscience rights when other rights or … Read more
The name Dietrich von Hildebrand is not, perhaps, as well known as it should be among intelligent and literate Catholics — or, for that matter, among Christians of any ilk. He is a man whom Pius XII referred to as “a 20th-century doctor of the Church.” Those who remember this pontiff will recall that he … Read more
On Tuesday, Nov. 8, the voters of Mississippi will have a very rare privilege in today’s America, so much of which is governed by unelected judges and unaccountable bureaucrats, where so many basic issues seem invulnerable to change: Those voters will have the chance to make an existential decision, to vote with a flip … Read more
One of the fundamental characteristics of modernism, that cultural shift in the way we see the world, ourselves and our condition, was the celebration of the ordinary – ordinary life, ordinary work, ordinary people and the ordinary things they do. Not everything about the “modern movement” – which began over a hundred years ago – … Read more
If you want to know what motivates the people involved in Occupy Wall Street, you can get a good idea from Think Progress, a left-leaning website. It offers a map of the continental United States labeled, “If U.S. land were divided like U.S. wealth.” In this representation, 1 percent of the people hold title … Read more