Essays

There is a growing crisis haunting the Catholic Church. And it is a crisis larger than the events that have so greatly afflicted the American Catholic Church. The pedophilia scandals are a horrifying element of this crisis. So, too, are the bishops who covered up and excused these outrages.

Many of us are deeply grieved by the recent events surrounding The New Republic, where Chris Hughes, its current publisher, having rejected the magazine's time-hon

            A long time ago, I was a kid.

            And when I was a kid, I played.

Popes are not merely the head of a Church. Because they are the spiritual leader of a billion people, popes also have a role to play in shaping and forming global order. And historically, there have been popes who have used this position to change the direction of world events.

With the same predictability and inevitability of a House vote to abolish Obamacare, Bill O'Reilly yet again has declared his false war on the faux 

So it’s Saturday night, date night, and I’m looking for somewhere fun to take my wife.  Then I see there’s something called Ice Theatre of New York.  And The New York Times has called it one of the 10 best cultural experiences in New York City.

Roderick Thorp was part of a small group of novelists who came together on a monthly basis in the late eighties in Los Angeles to chew the fat.

Are Western historians going soft on the Cold War that the Russians waged against the West for 45 years?

Louis Lewandowski may be the greatest German composer you’ve never heard of.  But hearing his setting of Psalm 150, just once, launched the career of America’s leading conductor of Jewish music.  And hearing his music, just once, launched a festival

I could decry the stores that open on Thanksgiving Day,

Or how, among the young, antisocial media holds sway,

Ferguson’s cry for justice that the system will not heed,

Peter Yarrow has every right to be disappointed with our war-torn world. 

At 76, however, he remains hopeful that things can improve and that he—and music—can still be the catalyst for change.

After ten years of planning and six years of construction the Harvard Art Museums opens its doors to the public on November 16. The $350 million renovation combines the collections of three distinct museums – the Fogg, Busch-Reisinger, and Arthur M.

Dr. Ezekiel Emanuel is director of the Clinical Bioethics Department of the US National Institutes of Health, and heads the Department of Medical Ethics & Health Policy at the University of Pennsylvania. He has been acknowledged as the prime mover and advocate for Obamacare.

There is always a point, about 250 pages into writing a novel, where I want to set fire to it.

I have done that in the past. Twice. Thankfully, by now I’ve learned that the whole point of writing a first draft is to get it on the page so you can fix it.

When composer Morton Feldman first heard Atlas Eclipticalis by John Cage he described it as “the most thrilling experience of my life.” The comp

Why attempt to create art, I ask, to make something “other” when faced with the dilemmas of existence, with, as I’ve said in one of my own short stories, “all the ways that life betrays the living?”

Mother-Daughter Book Club fans, rejoice.  Heather Vogel Frederick, author of the erudite and beloved series of novels for and about girls who love to read, has reversed her decision to end matters after six volumes and will publish the seventh—and absolute

Imagine if you had all the time, money, and knowledge of art to fly around the world, visit museums, galleries, and churches in the company of the world’s top art critics, and then describe what makes great works of art—ones with which most people are not familiar—grea