Articles

It is no wonder that we fallen mortals would drive a heavy spike through the opened hands of Christ, bloodily impaling him atop the rocky pate of Golgotha.

Perhaps out of these fissures and the current populist turmoil, someone might be able to craft a new, more coherent, and more promising Christian and Democratic coalition.

It is time to consider what the latest uproar against Pope Benedict XVI and the Catholic Church tells us about the state of our society. It is an ugly truth: the reordering of western society to the one imperative of sexual fulfillment. But, ultimately, to paraphrase T.S. Eliot, we shall die not of decadence but of boredom.

If your religion--or at least your concept of the moral norms of the civil order--lacks a notion of grace, it therefore also lacks a notion of gifts; all it can say is that some people are lucky, not that some people are blessed.

But how can such plural sovereignty be realised under the circumstances of this century? Who will guard the guardians, so to speak? How will the stones of the arch fit together?

Bush's strong effort to restore the freedom of the church took the political side of this freedom for the whole meaning of the tradition. At the same time, his supply-side policies benefiting the wealthiest Americans could not have been more antithetical to the social-pluralist vision that inspired his faith-based initiative.