Brian Caulfield

  In the fall of 1979, less than a year after being elected pope, John Paul II took America by storm. Landing in Boston and stopping at major eastern cities, the youthful pontiff lifted the spirits of a nation that was dragging its way toward the end of a long, dispiriting... Read More →

  Long before Pope Leo XIV spoke of the mixed blessings of artificial intelligence and was named by Time a Top 100 figure on the hot topic, the Catholic Church had expounded on another AI, i.e., artificial insemination. The two AIs have more in common than might seem at... Read More →

  When Jesus, asked about inheriting eternal life, affirmed the need for the Great Commandment to love God before all things and your neighbor as yourself, the expert in Jewish law (“wishing to justify himself”) then asked, “And who is my neighbor?” (Luke 10:25-29). Jesus... Read More →

  My father had a signature to rival John Hancock’s. The “J” of his “John” was just as intricate and imposing as the well-known one on the Declaration of Independence. And the “f” in his “Caulfield” was a unique series of... Read More →

  [This article appeared in a slightly shorter form in First Things on May 3, 2010, ten years after the death of Cardinal John O’Connor. It is reprinted here, with the magazine’s permission,  to mark the 25th anniversary of the beloved Cardinal’s passing.] I first got to... Read More →

  Just when the nation seems to be teetering on the edge of political and cultural inanity, with one side defending what the other seeks to undo, there comes bipartisan news: Pitchers and catchers are warming up at baseball training camps in Florida and Arizona. Though it... Read More →

  I remember visiting my future wife in her Manhattan office back in the pre-Y2K dark ages, when style guides instructed us to capitalize the words Internet and Website. Working for a tech startup that recruited programmers for other tech startups that were busy adding two... Read More →

  A New York funeral Mass celebrated by a Catholic bishop and a trio of nationally known priests would seem to indicate that the person being mourned was famous or perhaps a major church donor. Yet the deceased who drew such notable clergy, as well as lay leaders of the... Read More →

  The cultural and media critic Neil Postman (1931-2003) was a 20th-century prophet. His seminal work Amusing Ourselves to Death, published in 1985, may seem a bit quaint today in its railing against the evil effects of television on reading, culture, and the very shape and... Read More →

  In the hopeful spring of 1990, soon after the Berlin Wall had fallen and as freedom-seeking crowds of Eastern Europeans were kicking in the rotten doors of a crumbling Soviet empire, one of the great figures of the dawning decade stood by the Washington Monument looking... Read More →