The Shakers, who arrived in America in 1774, are a religious community facing extinction. Their decline means nothing less than the end of an idea of heaven.
Thirty years ago, the Velvet Revolution marked the demise of Soviet control of Czechoslovakia. My enthusiasm for Vaclav Havel’s lucid writing continues to this day.
Despite occasionally sincere, sometimes ritualistic, expressions of communion with Rome, the effort to neuter Pope Francis’s message in the United States continues.
The Supreme Court refused to hear an appeal from Remington Arms, putting a 2005 gun rights law at risk. Let the law fall soon, and let it be just the start.
Thanksgiving is at once the most traditional of holidays and the most radical. Even the best things we do are contingent on support and help from others.
In recent decades, the institutions created to prevent corrupt dealings have themselves become complicit. Whistleblowers need protection, now more than ever.
This year seems unusual, both for the number and scale of protests across the world. What links them is the growing demand for greater income equality.
The bishops’ insistence on abortion as the preeminent political issue reveals their resistance to Pope Francis’s call to serve the common good in all its complexity.
The territory along the Syrian-Turkish border is the ancestral homeland of an ancient tradition of Aramaic-speaking Christianity. They’ve been betrayed before.
