I woke up this morning to the happy news that “Alternate Side of the Street Parking” is suspended in New York City today. It’s even better in Europe – in the Netherlands and Germany, for example, where this is still a legal public holiday!  St. Bernard of Clairvaux [1090-1153] is supposed to have described the Ascension as “the consummation and fulfillment of all other festivals, and a happy ending to the whole journey of the Son of God.” But I think we can just as correctly characterize the Ascension as the continuation of that journey – now by means of his C ..read more

  One of the distinctive features of the Easter season is the daily reading of the Acts of the Apostles, which takes us back to the earliest Christian communities and their unique experience of the ongoing presence of the Risen Christ in their midst. Reading Acts, we get to experience vicariously the inspiring internal life of those apostolic Christian communities, living their own kingdom as a religious alternative to the empire in which they remained enmeshed.   I felt some of that inspiration during last month’s Paulist Summit on Polarization, ambitiously subtitled Bri ..read more

Campus violence is in the news, all over the news. Of course, most young people of college age are not students at four-year colleges or universities. And most of those who are do not attend elite institutions like Columbia. Even so, the media has focused intensely on this issue. And many of those who think or write about what is happening on our campuses cannot resist recalling 1968. I was 20 years old in 1968, now widely regarded as the most tumultuous year in modern American history, and I remember it well. That miserable year began with the Tet Offensive at the end of January, then Euge ..read more

  Historian and Pulitzer-Prize winner, Doris Kearns Goodwin has been around and producing great books since I was in grad school. Her latest is a bit different and somewhat special. In An Unfinished Love Story: A Personal History of the 1960s (Simon and Schuster, 2024) she is still doing history, but within the context and through the unique lens of her marriage to "Camelot" veteran Richard Goodwin, her husband of 42 years. The book takes the form of a recollection of the written memories in archival boxes of her and her husband's personal and political experiences, primarily during the ..read more

  N.T. Wright, a retired Bishop of the Church of England, is an eminent and well-known scripture scholar and theologian. In this latest book, Jesus and the Poers: Christian Political Wirness in a Age of Totalitarian Terror and and Dysfunctional Democracies (2024), he and his co-author, Australian theologian Michael Bird, seek to address in straightforward, non-technical language the perennial question of the Christian commitment to politics and government, a question that has acquired increased salience in a post-Christendom world, in which the once widely acclaimed alternative of libera ..read more

This weekend, I have been attending a conference on overcoming toxic political polarization, "Bridging the Divide, Seeking Reconciliation," organized by the Paulist Fathers. Perhaps that is what is disposing me to be more charitable to someone I would normally be less inclined say a kind word about, namely the present (perhaps temporary) Speaker of the House, MAGA right-winger Mike Johnson. But the main reason must be that, for whatever reason or reasons, the Speaker suddenly seems to be sounding like an old-fashioned politician, like (dare I say?) a 20th-century "Reagan Republican." Pe ..read more

  "Heartily, deeply did I ever reciprocate Dr. Brownson's affection, and the long and eventful years have but strengthened more and more my love for him and my admiration for his genius - convictions and emotions which have drawn from me in these articles my feeble attempt to estimate his providential mission and to introduce my countrymen to the study of his works" [Isaac Hecker, "Dr. Brownson and Catholicity," Catholic World, 46, (1887), p. 235]. Largely forgotten among contemporary American Catholics, but someone whoi deserves to be remembered and appreciated even still,&nb ..read more

  We set out to find His friends to tell them. We went to Jerusalem to tell them; and with joy we told them, “We have seen the Lord!” And as we were speaking there, He stood among us, blessed us, said to us, “Now my peace I leave with you.” We saw Him! Suddenly our eyes were opened, and we knew He was alive!   Some of the old-timers here may recognize those lines from the second verse of the hymn, In the Breaking of the Bread,* which we used to sing here at Saint Paul’s every Easter season. It recalls some of the highlights from Emmaus to Pentecost, among them the event ..read more

  The actual American Civil War officially began on this date in 1861, with the Confederate attack on Fort Sumter. Most of us have grown up with casual cultural assumptions about American democracy's exceptionalism that have made it easy for us to normalize such conflicts in failed or failing states elsewhere but have made it comparably difficult for us to imagine that another such conflict could ever again occur in the United States. We instinctively assume that our stable political culture (and our antiquated constitution) could somehow protect us from intensifying democrati ..read more

  "We are forever elsewhere," wrote MIT Professor Sherry Turtle in 2015 about our new life with smartphones. She is quoted approvingly by Social Psychologist Jonathan Haidt in his latest book, The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood Is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness (NY: Penguin Random House, 2024). According to Haidt, "a profound transformation of human consciousness and relationships" occurred between 2010 and 2015. This was "the birth of the phone-based childhood" and it marked "the definitive end of the play-baed childhood." Haidt is hardly alone in lame ..read more