Obama owes more on religious freedom

Is modernity inherently secularizing? Do certain basic features of modern life implacably diminish the plausibility and power of religion?

Catholics find it increasingly difficult to sustain expectations of their church engaging & redeeming modernity. The problem is not simply that the institutional church today stands discredited, but that it has misconstrued the problem. The ramparts it persists in defending have long since been scaled, breached, and bypassed & have fallen into ruin.

How persuasively is the church making its case against gay marriage?

Coming of age in East Germany

We’re still debating whether what we’re doing in Libya can rightly be described as war, though bombs dropped amid an “intervention” are just as deadly. But where’s the debate over whether it’s fair or accurate to assert that Republicans in Congress have not-so-stealthily declared a “war on women”?

It's not too late to ask.

Never before have people in the Middle East mobilized in such vast numbers to shake off the chains of autocracy. Whether Egypt and Tunisia succeed in creating genuinely democratic societies remains to be seen—but already we can identify important lessons.

When the paper trail disappears

Lisa Sowle Cahill’s middle way

Benedict & condoms

It’s in vogue to ask what the Internet is doing to our brains. Will constant exposure to technology destroy human memory and attention span? Are students really learning if they’re taking notes on their laptops, but keeping Facebook and e-mail windows open simultaneously, and also surreptitiously texting on their cell phones?

Liu Xiaobo's goodwill, courage, and humbling example were recognized by the Nobel Committee earlier this month when, to near universal if muted acclaim, it awarded the imprisoned activist the Nobel Peace Prize for his steadfast nonviolent resistance to the tyrannical rule of China's Communist Party.

A review of Ill Fares the Land, the late Tony Judt's final book

What does Rome know about pop music?

In The Flight of the Intellectuals, a study of the Swiss Muslim thinker Tariq Ramadan and Ramadan's admirers in the Western press, Paul Berman shows he's in over his head.

Extending the argument against sex-selective abortion

In his new book The Jesuit Guide to (Almost) Everything, Fr. James Martin tries to introduce a new generation of spiritual seekers to the Jesuit tradition.

A selection of articles from Commonweal on Benedict XVI.

A profile of the ethicist Gilbert Meilaender

No, this “Year of the Priest” has not been the best for priests or for any Catholics. Just when some of us thought we might be turning the corner, moving on, re-establishing some level of trust, it turns out the wounds are far deeper and much more widespread than we thought.

Among elected officials, journalists, and average citizens, intensifying partisan polarization is thought to be one of the dominant political trends of our times. Yet it has proved remarkably controversial among political scientists.

Stanley Hauerwas & the Christian Difference

The New York Times's worldview is secularist and secularizing, and as such it rivals the Catholic worldview. But what makes the Times unique is that it is not just the nation's self-appointed newspaper of record. It is, to paraphrase Chesterton, an institution with the soul of a church.

Unbelief in Ian McEwan's Fiction

 Civilization & its discontents

  What does secularism mean for the spiritual quest—of believers & nonbelievers alike?

  Reviewing Charles Taylor’s ’A Secular Age.’

  One hundred years after the so-called Modernist crisis, what lessons does the episode hold for today’s church?

 All you need to know about the failure of Christopher Hitchens’s latest antireligious screed.

  Is Andrew Sullivan right to emphasize the role of doubt in any serious theology?

  Dealing with the spiritual-but-not-religious epidemic.

  What is the price of "progress"?

What does the unlikely pairing of evangelicals and Catholics mean for U.S. politics?

Should the church’s response to secularization be a call for a return to Christendom? At least one bishop seems to think so. As William D. Wood reports, Cardinal Francis George advanced this idea at a recent academic conference. According to George, Wood writes, “the current spiritual problem of secularization in Europe is the result of unjust political decisions made by panoply of American and European leaders.” The implication is that secularization is best countered by making the political order less secular.