Evaluations of Benedict's tenure have balanced the pros and cons of his deeds according to the lights of the balancer. What is untallied, except for his failure to unmistakably demand accountability in regard to clerical sexual abuse, is what has remained undone. Underlying conditions like the limitations of the clergy or the eroding credibility of church teachings on sexuality are no better than when he took office.

Confronting Sexual Abuse in the Boy Scouts & the Church

In the final installment of our series, William Galston responds to the U.S. Catholic bishops' latest statement on religious freedom. 

Ross Douthat's Bad Religion, is a readable, thought-provoking book that ought to be called Good Religion, Bad History.

For the umpteenth straight year, the New York Times’s massive “Holiday Books” edition of the Sunday Book Review gives no attention to books about religion. This makes perfect sense. Isn’t the “Holiday Books” edition a very commercial effort oriented toward gift-giving? And doesn’t everyone know that the traditional holiday for giving people books is January 1, New Year’s Day?

Report on the new translation of the Roman Missal

An exchange

How not to write about the cardinal & his time

This book proposes a new narrative for understanding the past three decades of our democratic life, a “thirty-year war” in which a long slow struggle through much of the 20th century for greater equality of income and wealth has been reversed.

Remembering Wilfrid Sheed

One out of every three Americans who were raised Catholic have left the church. That dwarfs the bankruptcies of GM and Chrysler. Thomas Reese, SJ, recently described that loss as “a disaster.” He added, “You wonder if the bishops have noticed.”

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

Stanley Hauerwas & the Christian Difference

  Reviewing Charles Taylor’s ’A Secular Age.’

Benedict's ‘Jesus of Nazareth' 

From the archives: four responses to the terrorist attacks of 9/11

  The U.S. Catholic bishops’ reports on sexual abuse in the church represent a landmark endeavor. Peter Steinfels goes beyond the numbers to lay out what we’ve learned and what we still don’t know. Fusce fermentum odio quis neque. Phasellus vitae lacus sed enim faucibus euismod.