Christopher Orlet
Proponents of the charter movement as a quick fix for broken urban schools got some please-God-no news last week. The Missouri State Board of Education pulled the charters of all six Imagine schools in St. Louis. This means a third…
After 2012 Jefferson Lecturer Wendell Berry, of Port Royal, Kentucky, received a standing ovation, the chairman of the National Endowment for Humanities Jim Leach rose to remind the audience that Mr. Berry’s words did not reflect the official policy of…
Whether one is God-fearing or not, conservatives should be heartened by a recent story in the Wall Street Journal headlined “Traditional Catholicism Is Winning.” Just when it seemed that decades of sex abuse scandals, creeping secularism, and the popularity of…
This spring I gave up the Boob Tube for Lent. It turned out to be a remarkably pain-free sacrifice. Not only that, but I think my IQ may have inched up a few points. Lent has come and gone, but…
One hears much these days of the Urban Farming Movement. One almost expects to glimpse a combine harvester winding down South Broadway or hear a milch cow lowing in a misty alley. But so far, with the exception of a…
A friend from church last year purchased an abandoned, ramshackle corner tavern up the street from our house. Allan and his wife Julie, both hippie types in their late thirties, are deeply religious people who make their living conserving old…
One item stood out for me in the coverage of last week’s killing spree that left seven dead in France. That was how the late gunman, Mohamed Merah of Toulouse, was alleged to have traveled to Afghanistan in 2011. The…
Soon a group of Catholic nuns and other do-gooders will have to find something less meaningful to occupy their time. For years, religious charities and nonprofits like Let’s Start, Mothers and Children Together, and Parents and Their Children have been…
One of social scientist Charles Murray’s novel solutions to closing the widening chasm between the well-to-do and the poor is to encourage them to live next door to one other. Presumably, by living in the same neighborhoods as the upper…
Remember when a fish fry was just fish fry? These days — when everything hip is hyped to the nth degree, and everyone and his brother is an amateur marketing guru — dinner time on the Lenten day of reflection…
