‘A Complex Picture’ Four days after Pope Francis was taken to the hospital to be treated for acute bronchitis and fever, I flew to Rome for an unruly mix of motives, professional and personal. In my gut I felt the prospect of his passing, and as his biographer, I did not want to miss this final chapter. I wanted to be near him, or at least near to the flow of information about him, as one might move to be near an ailing elderly relative who has played a major role in one’s life. During more than one of many interviews that fortnight, when asked what he was like and how it was to be with him ..read more

Getting the Message Elected officials ducking difficult questions is hardly a new phenomenon. But Republican representatives are now actively avoiding not only difficult questions but any direct contact with their constituents following a series of contentious town halls around the country. In Oshkosh, Wisconsin, Republican representative Glenn Grothman, who was reelected with more than 60 percent of the vote, was met with a barrage of boos and expletives from a crowd of more than one hundred people who were upset about cuts to federal programs at the hands of Elon Musk and his Department of ..read more

Was January 6 a Providential Event? Ross Douthat, a conservative columnist at The New York Times, and Jonathan Rauch, a senior fellow in Governance Studies at the liberal Brookings Institution, have both written new books endorsing religion. Douthat is a Catholic, and his book is titled Believe: Why Everyone Should Be Religious. Given Rauch’s former indifference to religion, his book’s title is more surprising—Cross Purposes: Christianity’s Broken Bargain with Democracy. Rauch calls himself a Jewish atheist who happens to be gay. But he now regrets what he wrote twenty years ago about the tr ..read more

Cutting and Undercutting The Trump administration’s Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) is embarking on the largest deregulatory action in U.S. history, targeting thirty-one rules for reconsideration or repeal. Among these are standards for air quality and limits on emissions of particulate matter, greenhouse gases, and carcinogenic chemicals. Announcing the plan, EPA administrator Lee Zeldin described current regulations as “suffocating.” It’s clear whose suffocation Zeldin is most worried about: not the thousands of Americans who die prematurely from pollution-related causes every year ..read more

Seeking a New Way “Unfortunately, the political community is not always organized and today our people are living in a time of crisis and seeking a new way of life so that they can move beyond the shameful times which we presently experience and form a new society and a new people.” These are the words of Archbishop Óscar Romero in his 1979 homily for the thirtieth Sunday in ordinary time. Reading Romero’s homilies and pastoral letters today in the United States, as our executive branch machetes its way toward a constitutional crisis, is like peering at our image in a carnival mirr ..read more

Mighty Winds The weeks leading up to Easter in El Paso, Texas are marked by los vientos de cuaresma, or the winds of Lent.  It’s been like this since anyone can remember.  Newcomers to the city are always taken aback by their first experience, partly thrilled by the novelty and partly hypnotized by the magnitude of the hazy swirling sand.  But first impressions fade fast. There is nothing pleasant about it. High-velocity winds pulverize the city with the sand of the Chihuahua Desert. The grains insinuate themselves into every car engine, window sill, filling your nostrils and ..read more

Press On A few years after buying The Washington Post, Jeff Bezos said that “certain institutions have a very important role in making sure that there is light,” an idea that inspired the paper’s instantly famous slogan, “Democracy Dies in Darkness.” Officially introduced in 2017, the slogan had been decided on before Donald Trump took office—serendipitously, given what soon unfolded. But Bezos has since had a change of heart. Last fall, he spiked the paper’s endorsement of Kamala Harris, and in the months that followed, he killed political cartoons and columns critical of him, contributed ..read more

More, or Else As much as Trump’s chaos may appall liberals, part of the president’s appeal is that he breaks things. He breaks expectations, norms, even laws, and he breaks promises and alliances. He is seeking to break much of the federal government; he may recklessly break the social safety net to deliver another tax cut to the rich. He is the proverbial bull in the china shop, with no thought for what he’s breaking and no plan for cleaning things up. If status-quo arrangements are working well enough for you, none of this is likely to be very attractive. But if things aren’t working for y ..read more

Crisis Mismanagement In the weeks before he was arrested by Immigration and Customs Enforcement in Manhattan, Mahmoud Khalil wrote to Columbia University officials asking how they would “protect [international] students’ rights to free speech...and stop the suppression and now potential criminalization of that speech.” Khalil, a permanent resident and green-card holder, was one of the leaders of student protests against Israel’s war in Gaza. Born in a Palestinian refugee camp in Syria, Khalil earned a master’s degree in December from Columbia’s School of International and Public Affairs. At ..read more

‘The Wounds Which Disfigure’ This month marks the twenty-fifth anniversary of Pope John Paul II’s jubilee-year pilgrimage to the Holy Land, a journey that can continue to help us understand the catastrophic struggles wracking that sacred place and its people. I was fortunate enough to be freed from my desk-bound duties as an editor at Newsday to cover the seven-day pilgrimage alongside the paper’s Pulitzer Prize–winning religion reporter, Bob Keeler, and even to attend a week-long conference in Jerusalem for religion journalists before the pope’s arrival.  It was a hopeful time, compare ..read more