George McKenna

  Dear Peter, I hope that you will not take it amiss if I write this in a more informal style than we’ve been using, but my feeling is that now may be a good time to engage in direct dialogue. Wasn’t it something like that which you first proposed to Anne Conlon after reading my... Read More →

A Bad Bargain: A Postcript           At about the middle of September I wrote a piece on this site critical of an article in Commonweal magazine by Peter Steinfels, a writer and former editor of the magazine... Read More →

 A Bad Bargain In his 1858 debates with Senator Stephen A. Douglas, Abraham Lincoln argued not for an immediate national abolition of slavery but for preventing its spread into the new territories. Lincoln understood that if slavery’s growth were arrested as the rest of the... Read More →