Catholics in the U.S. may soon know North Dakota as the cutting edge of Catholic higher education reform.

On the evening of Sept. 12, 2006, my wife and I were dining in Krakow with Polish friends when an agitated Italian Vaticanista (pardon the redundancy in adjectives) called and demanded to know what I thought of “Zees crazee speech of zee pope about zee Muslims.” That was my first hint that the herd of independent minds in the world press was about to go ballistic on the subject of Benedict XVI’s Regensburg Lecture: a “gaffe”-bone on which the media continued to gnaw until the end of Benedict’s pontificate.

In a year replete with devastating news, the June 22 death of Middle East scholar Fouad Ajami hit especially hard. For decades, Ajami – a man of genius, whom I was honored to call a friend – was an invaluable mentor in matters involving the Arab world and its often lethal discontents.

My son Stephen and I spent an unusual, albeit unusually moving, Independence Day:

Richard of St. Victor, a 12th-century Scottish theologian, is not exactly a household name in 21st-century Christian circles.

In 1989, as the Cold War entered the bottom of the ninth inning, political scientist Francis Fukuyama wrote a memorable essay titled “The End of History?” And the argument resolved itself in a straightforward answer: “Yes.”

I’ve been writing op-ed columns for the Catholic press since 1979. I began this column in 1993 at the invitation of the late Kay Lagreid, then-editor of the now-deceased Catholic Northwest Progress in Seattle.

In recent years, as scholars have explored Ronald Reagan’s foreign policy with greater access to primary-source documents, something utterly baffling to the conventional wisdom of his time – and ours – has come into focus: Reagan, while determined to win the Cold War, was also eager to rid the world of nuclear weapons.