George Weigel commeNTARY
Books for Christmas – 2022
A look at a few books that would make good Christmas gifts for Catholics.
Genocide in Ukraine?
Yale historian Timothy Snyder thinks that, measured by the criteria of the Genocide Convention (to which Russia is a party), the Russian war in Ukraine is genocidal.
An open letter to the Synod General Secretary
Catholic schools in our inner-urban areas, like the new, state-of-the-art Mother Mary Lange School in Baltimore, are the most effective anti-poverty program the U.S. Church has ever devised — and they serve students from many religious backgrounds.
The Summer Reading List: A Ukrainian Primer
Given the rubbish about Ukraine spewed out by Russian propaganda trolls and regurgitated by foolish or ideologically besotted Americans, this year’s annual Summer Reading List will focus on serious books that explain the background, including the religious dimension, of a conflict that will shape Europe’s future – and ours.
Marching toward a different future
A post-Roe America will be one in which the pro-life movement must work with state legislators to provide legal protection to unborn children.
The sacred earthiness of Christmas
“Besides the cradle in which our Lord, it is alleged, was rocked, is the stone manger of the grotto of Bethlehem. One of the stones of this manger is shown in the basilica of St. Maria Maggiore on the Esquiline, in the altar of the crypt of the chapel of the Blessed Sacrament.
On not buying into the mythology of “prestige” universities
Parents and high school seniors making those tough college decisions would do well to look beyond the U.S. News and World Report college rankings and consider UD, Benedictine College, the University of Mary, Christendom College, Thomas Aquinas College, and other small Catholic liberal arts colleges.
A bold Catholic investment in inner city education
Today, inner-urban Catholic schools are a lifeline for children whose futures are being put at even greater risk by failing government schools and hidebound teachers’ unions that resist educational reform while engaging in various forms of ideological indoctrination.
Moral courage and the many cultures of death
Ryszard Kuklinski was a genuine hero of the long, twilight struggle against communist totalitarianism — the man who helped prevent a bloody Soviet invasion of Poland to crush the nascent Solidarity movement.
The oldest cathedral and the newest challenge
It’s now the Basilica of the National Shrine of the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary, but for native Baltimoreans of a certain vintage (like me) it is, was, and always will be “the Old Cathedral:” the first of its kind in the United States