With Pennsylvania widely considered the most crucial of the seven 2024 swing states and America feeling stuck in a winter of discord haunted by the specter of political violence, I decided to report on the election from Punxsutawney.

The violence has claimed the lives of thousands of innocent victims, but it also “struck a profound blow to the common feeling of belonging to the Holy Land, to the consciousness of being part of a plan of Providence.”

One year after Oct. 7, we live amid a stunning increase in antisemitism. Never in my nearly 40 years as a rabbi have I heard so many expressions of despair from the Jewish community. Never have I come so close to it myself.

President Biden's new restrictions on asylum at the U.S.-Mexico border have drawn criticism from Catholics who minister to immigrants and refugees.

Focus on the fate of Israel, its hostages in Gaza and the people of Gaza and south Lebanon means that little attention is being paid to other continuing crises around the world—Sudan, Haiti, Myanmar among them.

Catholics in the audience may not have been as startled by Senator Vance’s emphatic, sympathetic invocation of the second response of the Kyrie eleison.