Essays

Rudy Giuliani is blaming President Obama for the murder of two NYPD officers.

The holiday season is always a good time to take stock of the year just past and see what we might anticipate in the 12 months to come. In the case of Pope Francis, it is fair to say that a great deal went well.

The day went something like a Keystone Kops comedy from the silent movie era.

Pope Francis has opened the Pearly Gates to Blue Heelers.

William Shatner is daring to go where no author has gone before. 

The original Star Trek captain is using modern technology—Kickstarter—to fund a campaign to publish and market a new book.

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

            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.