More comfortable online than out partying, post-Millennials are safer, physically, than adolescents have ever been. But they’re on the brink of a mental-health crisis. But they’re on the brink of a mental-health crisis. One day last summer, around noon, I called Athena, a 13-year-old who lives in Houston, Texas. She answered her phone – she’s had Read more
As its 50th-anniversary approaches, the story of how Blessed Pope Paul VI arrived at the final text of Humanae Vitae will be a main focus of discussion. Paul VI issued his encyclical in 1968 after a commission of theologians and experts spent four years meeting to study in-depth whether the Church could be open to Read more
Which is generally more often to blame if a person is poor: lack of effort on their own part or difficult circumstances beyond their control? The Washington Post and the Kaiser Family Foundation asked 1,686 American adults to answer that question — and found that religion is a significant predictor of how Americans perceive poverty. Read more
The practice of polygamy, or having more than one spouse at the same time, is illegal in all US 50 states. But the percentage of Americans who say the practice is morally acceptable reached an all-time high this year, according to a recent Gallup poll. Gallup has measured American attitudes toward a number of social issues and Read more
SpaceX and Tesla CEO Elon Musk got into a spat recently on Twitter with Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg over the dangers of artificial intelligence. Musk urged a group of governors to proactively regulate AI, which he views as a “fundamental risk to the existence of human civilization.” “Until people see robots going down the street killing people, they Read more
In 1892, Pope Leo XIII addressed a letter to the Catholics of France. For a century French politics had been divided between mostly Catholic monarchists and mostly anti clericalist republicans, and the church had championed royalists against the secular republic. But now the pope urged French Catholics to take a different approach — to rally to the Read more
In the United States we see pews as a necessary and basic part of every Catholic church. However, pews are a rather recent invention and surprisingly didn’t even originate in Catholicism. For most of Church history, worshipers stood during the celebration of Mass. There did exist a few scattered benches for the elderly to sit Read more
On the heels of one controversial Vatican article alleging an “ecumenism of hate” between conservative Evangelicals and Catholics in America, another potential eyebrow-raiser emerged Saturday claiming that the “main obstacle” to implementing Pope Francis’s vision is “closure, if not hostility” from “a good part of the clergy, at levels both high and low.” The term Read more
“Pat!” Msgr. John McSweeney calls down the hall. Two heads poke out of two offices, and two replies of “Yes?” come back to him. “This is nothing,” the correct Pat says as she walks me down the hall. “We had eight Pats in the office at one point, and two of them were priests.” A Read more
I am going through a personal crisis. I used to love reading. I am writing this blog in my office, surrounded by 27 tall bookcases laden with 5,000 books. Over the years I have read them, marked them up, and recorded the annotations in a computer database for potential references in my writing. To a Read more