new and intriguing historical explorations of just what the English Reformation entailed, back in the 16th century.George Weigel, a Newsweek contributor, is distinguished senior fellow of Washington's Ethics and Public Policy Center.
When he meets Pope Benedict XVI at the Vatican on July 10, President Barack Obama will find himself in conversation with a man who is, at heart, a teacher. Which raises the question: what lessons might Professor Ratzinger be interested in proposing to President Obama?
grandfather running a corporation," says James Martin, who works at the Jesuit magazine America. "He's shy," offers George Weigel, the papal biographer who is also a newsweek contributor. "He also has a sense that the word of truth should have
No matter how much the Vatican rightly insists that the primary purpose of Benedict XVI's journeys outside Rome is to "strengthen the brethren"—as Christ instructed Peter to do—papal travel is inevitably political travel. Especially when that travel is to the Holy Land.
that underscored religious liberty rather than the imposition of explicitly religious values in the public sphere.George Weigel, the Roman Catholic theologian and papal biographer, disagrees with talk of a post-Christian America—to an extent
the Society of St. Pius X," has upset many liberal Catholics as well as some quite conservative ones, among them George Weigel. But should we consider it as an internal affair of the Roman Catholic Church? Here is why we should not.The crucial
the Catholic right, just when it was fading into insignificance on the dwindling Catholic left, its longtime home.GEORGE WEIGEL, a NEWSWEEK contributor, is Distinguished Senior Fellow of Washington's Ethics and Public Policy Center, where
no bad way for the man who dubbed his poor Bedford-Stuyvesant parish "St. John the Mundane" to be remembered.GEORGE WEIGEL, a Newsweek contributor, holds the William E. Simon Chair at Washington's Ethics and Public Policy Center.
Father Richard John Neuhaus's work will be remembered and debated for decades. As a Lutheran pastor, he was one of the first civil-rights activists to identify the pro-life cause with the moral truths for which he and others had marched in Selma; he set the terms of the contemporary American church-state debate and added a new phrase to our public vocabulary with his 1984 bestseller, "The Naked Public Square." As a Catholic priest, he helped define new patterns of theological dialogue between Catholics and evangelicals, and between Christians and Jews. The journal he launched in the early 1990s, First Things, quickly became, under his leadership and inspiration, the most important vehicle for exploring the tangled web of religion and society in the English-speaking world. All of this suggests that Richard Neuhaus was, arguably, the most consequential public theologian in America since the days of Reinhold Niebuhr and John Courtney Murray, S.J.
There is nothing like Debrett's Peerage in these United States. If there were, Avery Cardinal Dulles, S.J., who died on the feast of Our Lady of Guadalupe, Dec. 12, would surely have been in it.