Judging by the impassioned commentary from some Catholic quarters during recent confrontations between unionized public-sector workers and state governments, you’d think we were back in 1919, with the church defending the rights of wage slaves laboring in sweat shops under draconian working conditions. That would hardly seem to be the circumstances of, say, unionized American...Read More

When Mary Chilton first spotted the New World in November 1620, the 13-year-old had been aboard the Mayflower for 10 weeks, stuck in the same clothes and cramped in dark, damp quarters among seasick passengers and dying goats. Each family was allotted one storage trunk for all their possessions.Read More

The human mind has been referred to as a recording and playback machine. Sometimes I wish it didn’t record and play back certain things. What am I talking about?Read More

The sounds of a choir of Baltimore City Catholic schoolchildren and the Archbishop Curley High School drumline welcomed 1,100 formally dressed celebrants to the Baltimore Convention Center Oct. 22 for a gala dinner feting Catholic schools in the archdiocese.Read More

In the fall of 1972, a group of us, philosophy majors all, approached our dean of studies, Father Bob Evers, with a request: Under the supervision of a faculty member, could we build a two-credit senior seminar in our last college semester around Kenneth Clark’s BBC series, “Civilization,” which had been shown on American public...Read More

One of the (many) signs of our cultural decline is that verbal insults, these days, are almost invariably scatological or sexual, provoking a blizzard of asterisks whenever A wants to put the smackdown on B. Once upon a time, it was not so.Read More

Sixty-four years ago, on Aug. 14, 1947, Great Britain’s empire in the Indian subcontinent was divided into the independent, self-governing Dominions of India and Pakistan. The division of the subcontinent into two states was bitterly opposed by the Indian Congress Party and Winston Churchill, but supported by the Muslim League (with Congress, one of the...Read More

Implementing a Twitter firewall at home is a bit like asking a roommate to hide your Halloween candy.Read More