Sandy Hook should not have happened. Those 20 children and six teachers and administrators should not have died.

The day President John F. Kennedy was murdered, a Divine Word seminarian walked up the hill to our family’s apartment in Rome to tell my wife Sally and me the terrible news. Seeking wisdom, I wrote Dorothy Day.

The dogmatic thinking that convinced us that a phone could (should!) be a sheer piece of glass, that a swipe of a finger on a screen should feel like moving a real object, and that the Internet should be in our pockets has opened up tremendous possibilities.

How did this man so profoundly capture the aspiration and passion of an entire nation as he did mine that day in May 1994?

From 2013: Enforcing marijuana laws seriously drains social resources and contributes to the nation’s unconscionably high incarceration rate.

The mission of America, wrote its first editor in chief, is not only to “chronicle events of the day and the progress of the church” but also to “stimulate effort and originate movements for the betterment of the masses.” When John Wynne, S.J., penned those words in 1909, he