In All Things

Cambridge, MA. The semester is passing speedily, and we are past the half-way point. I realize then that I still have not called your attention to the wonderful exhibit currently at the Fogg, Harvard’s gloriously refurbished art museum, " Corita Kent and the Language of Pop ." Sister Corita Kent (born Frances Elizabeth Kent; 1918-1986) was for three decades a member of the Congregation...

On Monday, October 16, 1978, all the eyes of the world—at least, the Catholic world, anyway—were centered upon the city of Rome where over a hundred cardinals had gathered in a conclave at the Vatican to elect a new pope to lead the Roman Catholic Church. The cardinals had convened just two days earlier, on Oct. 14, some six weeks after the unexpectedly sudden and shocking death of Pope John Paul I, the former patriarch of Venice, who had been elected on Aug. 26 to succeed Pope Paul VI (who...

When Jean-François Millet unveiled his painting "The Gleaners" in 1857, a critic of the time expressed repulsion at three women in the foreground for “their ugliness and their grossness.” Each is bent toward the ground to a different degree, each gathering the scraps of wheat left over by the landowner’s appointed army of harvesters, who are working under the eyes of a foreman on a horse in the background. The...

Hillary Clinton was the only person to bring up Planned Parenthood in the first Democratic debate earlier this week; no moderator asked any question about abortion, and none of the other candidates addressed it. She characterized Republicans as rejecting government involvement in guaranteeing paid family leave, but not “mind[ing] having big government to interfere with a woman’s right to choose and to try to take down...

Three years after Paul Ryan and Joseph R. Biden debated each other as vice presidential candidates, Washington is anxiously waiting them to make anguishing choices about their futures, whether Mr. Ryan will answer his fractured party’s pleas to serve as speaker and whether Biden can overcome the death of his son to run for president. Mr. Ryan prefers making policy as chair of the Ways and Means Committee to trying to make a dysfunctional House work. He prefers to spend his time...

When I saw the headline in The Washington Post, I had to sit down.

In fact, I was sitting down.

The article that claimed my immediate attention was, truthfully—and I kid you not—actually was about sitting down: "Sitting for long periods doesn’t make death more imminent, study suggests”...

On a June night in 1858, about 1,000 delegates to the Illinois state Republican convention met in the State House in Springfield to choose the man who would be their candidate for the United States Senate against incumbent Democrat Stephen A. Douglas, a political powerhouse who was popularly known as “The Little Giant” (a tweak on both his small physical stature and his outsize political influence on the American politics of the day). The decision those delegates made that early evening was...

On his Apostolic Journey to the United States, Pope Francis brought a message of encouragement. He called us to press on, always forward, to meet the issues of our day with energy, imagination and determination. The Holy Father also urged us to look back. He persistently reminded us of our heritage and of our duty to protect it. The American tradition of religious freedom gives individuals and institutions, families and communities, the space to seek and live the truth. Religious freedom is...