Let’s pray for a pope who takes God and the church seriously—but not himself.

You can’t gut something, then leave behind a void and call it a legacy.

My mother was a great fan of Henry James. She kept his novels and essays in her bookcase along with books about the author and Leon Edel’s masterly five-volume biography, which she read end to end. I’ve always liked James too, though unlike true devotees I don’t adore his late work

Forty years later, the shock of Roe v. Wade remains.

I recently took a cross-country bus ride that was anything but comfortable. After those in my row had experienced bloodshed—the bus bounced so vigorously that a man was thrown up in the air, hit his head against the luggage rack and gushed blood just a few feet from me—and a whole lot of

The impulse to stand out, it seems, has been overtaken by the impulse to fit in.