FOR THE PAST decade or so, I’ve been assembling a mid-sized Judean village of Fontanini crèche figures, including artisans, herders (with sheep), farmers (with chickens and a historical turkey), vintners, blacksmiths, musicians, weavers and a fisherman or two (one awake, another asleep).
Author: George Weigel
Books for Christmas
IT’S BEEN A good year for publishing – at least in the sense of a lot of good books getting published – so here are some for the readers on your Christmas gift list, in addition, of course, to “Lessons in Hope: My Unexpected Life with St. John Paul II” (Basic Books), by your scribe:
A Meditation on ‘Maranatha’
HAPPY (REAL) new year: the beginning of a new year of grace, which began Dec. 3 with the First Sunday of Advent.
“The holidays” so overwhelm our senses each December that it’s hard to remember that Advent, the season of preparation for Christmas, has a “thy-kingdom-come” dimension as well as a Nativity dimension. For the first two weeks of Advent, the Church ardently and insistently prays the ancient Aramaic Maranatha: “Come, Lord Jesus!”
What’s Changed Since “Humanae Vitae”?
Rome’s Pontifical Gregorian University is hosting a lecture series to mark the 50th anniversary of “Humanae Vitae.” The series promises to examine problems that have emerged since Pope Paul wrote on the ethics of human love and family-planning. Yet the absence of “Humanae Vitae” proponents among the lecturers does not fill me with confidence.
A Museum For Which To Be Thankful
ON SEPT. 29, 1952, the publication of the complete Revised Standard Version (RSV) of the Bible was celebrated at the National Guard Armory in Washington, D.C., and the principal speaker was the U.S. Secretary of State, Dean Acheson.
As The Bard Might Say
FOUR CENTURIES AFTER his death, Shakespeare remains a peerless playwright because of his remarkable insight into the human condition. Love, ambition, fear, guilt, nobility, pomposity, patriotism, absurdity, sheer wickedness – you name it, Will grasped something of its essence. His work continues to help us understand ourselves better because whatever the changing of times and seasons, human nature changes very little.
You Have to Decide
IN WRITING “Lessons in Hope: My Unexpected Life with St. John Paul II,” one of my secondary intentions was to bury two urban legends: that John Paul II asked me to write his biography and that “Witness to Hope” and its sequel, “The End and the Beginning,” are authorized, or official biographies. Alas, the straightforward refutation of these myths in “Lessons in Hope” hasn’t done the job in some quarters. So let’s try again:
Murderers’ Row, Soviet-style
ONE HUNDRED years ago, on Nov. 7, 1917, Lenin and his Bolshevik Party expropriated the chaotic Russian people’s revolution that had begun eight months earlier, setting in motion modernity’s first experiment in totalitarianism. The ensuing bloodbath was unprecedented, not only in itself, but also in the vast bloodletting it inspired in wannabe-Lenins over the next six decades.
Which Reformation? What Reform?
Despite the formulation you’ll hear before and after the October 31 quincentenary of Luther’s 95 theses, there was no single “Reformation” to which the Catholic “Counter-Reformation” was the similarly univocal response. Rather, as Yale historian Carlos Eire shows in his eminently readable and magisterial work, Reformations: The Early Modern World, 1450 – 1650, there were multiple, contending reformations in play in the first centuries of modernity.
Whose Bourgeois Morality
IN THE LATEST debate over “Amoris Laetitia,” Pope Francis’ apostolic exhortation on marriage and family, a fervent defender of the document sniffed at some critics that “the Magisterium doesn’t bow to middle-class lobbies” and cited “Humanae Vitae” as an example of papal tough-mindedness in the face of bourgeois cultural pressures. It was a clever move, rhetorically, and we may hope that it’s right about the magisterial kowtow. I fear it also misses the point – or better, several points.
