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  Last week my office held a baby shower for a coworker and his eight-months-pregnant wife. It is their first baby, and there was lots of conversation about the nursery, the childbirth classes—all the usual things. And there was one of those cutesy baby-shower games: On... Read More →

  Imagine a conversation in which one executive confides to another something like this: “I don’t really want to hire that African-American guy,” says exec No. 1. “I understand, buddy, but legally we can’t reject a person based on race,” replies exec No. 2. “Geez. What do we... Read More →

Jack and I met in 1982 when we both arrived as freshmen at an engineering school in Pittsburgh.  The school assigned us to the same floor of the freshmen male dormitory, a hulking bunker of a building that smelled perpetually of college-boy sweat and marijuana. Though Jack and I... Read More →

America recently has been roiled by wholesale efforts to erase history. Monuments go missing in the middle of the night. Undergraduate snowflakes demand “trigger warnings” before they read a book that might tackle somebody or something ugly, hateful, or even controversial.... Read More →

  Blow on the coal of the heart. The candles in churches are out. The lights have gone out in the sky Blow on the coal of the heart And we’ll see by and by.      —from J.B.: A Play in Verse, by Archibald MacLeish   Cornflower blue skies and crisp breezes are what I... Read More →

  We had been close friends for twelve years, and I was blessed to be with him as the doctor helped him die. Growing stiffer and frailer over the last year or so, he had still enjoyed life, including a short walk we’d taken just a few days before, with him happily chasing... Read More →

  “People have a right to their own opinion,” Fr. Frank Pavone of Priests for Life recently remarked, “but they don’t have a right to their own facts.” He was speaking about the prevalent myth that late-term abortion is done only in cases of medical necessity—or that ... Read More →

  Advent of My Little Child Christ My Lord Oh My Father what was Your Thought To Send Your Son for me to hold To offer him a tiny babe In the weakest of arms, my own? Whene’er I touch such a babe As You send Who has no speech no word no ken Taken aback I stand in momentous... Read More →

  On September 22, 2017, U.S. District Judge Tanya Walton Pratt, in Planned Parenthood of Indiana and Kentucky et al. v. Indiana State Health Department Commissioner et al., permanently enjoined enforcement of a 2016 Indiana law regulating abortion... Read More →

Brightly colored flags greet visitors to the United States Holocaust Museum. The flags are not the national flags of the millions of victims of the shoah. Nor are they the national flags of the Allied powers who defeated Nazi Germany. Instead, they are the flags of the military... Read More →