November’s midterm elections are approaching, but over five million Americans, in nearly all 50 states, will be denied the right to cast ballots. Why? Because they are current or prior felony offenders who cannot exercise a right guaranteed them in the Constitution. Two million of them have co

Those who take an apocalyptic view of the campaign against international terrorism like to cite the historian Samuel Huntington’s prediction of a "clash of civilizations." Commentators sympathetic to this view applauded Pope Benedict XVI’s address at the University of Regensbur

In the minds of many Muslims, because the Catholic Church is the oldest and was for centuries the leading institution in the West, the church and the pope as its head are identified as representatives of the West. Though Pope Benedict XVI’s address in Regensburg, Germany, on Sept. 12 was devot

Armies inevitably refight the last war, and generals are often unprepared for the new war their enemy brings them. The law and ethics of war follow the same pattern. Years go by before lawmakers and ethicists recognize the worrisome changes that have overtaken warfare. It took decades for the human

Welfare rolls have dropped more than 50 percent over the past decade. Former President Bill Clinton, who spearheaded welfare reform through the 1996 Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act, promised to end welfare as we know it. Now he, along with Secretary of Health, Educati

Alma E. Miller was 102 years old when she died in 1994. For 78 of those years she had been a member of the religious congregation called the Society of the Sacred Heart. During much of that time, she was the mistress of studies, that is to say, the academic dean, in one or other of the schools for g