Latest Posts

January 10, 2023

Hong Kong Can Bar Overseas Lawyers in Lead Up to Jimmy Lai Trial

Less than a month after Hong Kong adjourned democracy advocate Jimmy Lai’s trial, Beijing has stacked the deck even further against the jailed entrepreneur and freedom fighter. After the Hong Kong High Court postponed Lai’s trial in December, the responsibility fell to Beijing’s Standing Committee of the National People’s Congress to determine the role of the media mogul’s international legal counsel. Continue Reading...
January 10, 2023

Faith and Reason in the Life and Work of Benedict XVI

With the December 31 passing of Pope Benedict XVI, the Catholic Church, Christianity, and the world lost one of the most significant and insightful minds of the last century. Certainly, within the Church, Joseph Ratzinger was among the most influential and esteemed theologians of the second half of the 20th century, all the way through his pontificate in the early 21st, to include the period of the Second Vatican Council, to which he was an important adviser. Continue Reading...
January 04, 2023

Why Christians Should Be (the Best) Landlords

Until a recent online debate, I hadn’t known about Kevin Nye, who has almost 15,000 followers on Twitter and a “housing first” plan to end homelessness. The man is clearly a deeply sincere, theologically progressive Christian, personally invested in working with the homeless in Minneapolis. Continue Reading...
December 31, 2022

Pope Benedict XVI: 1927-2022

“I would like to ask you all for a special prayer for Pope Emeritus Benedict, who is supporting the Church in silence. Remember him—he is very ill—asking the Lord to console him and to sustain him in this witness of love for the Church, until the end.” Continue Reading...
December 29, 2022

Sunset Blvd. Is Your New Year’s Sanity Test

Last New Year’s Eve, I wrote about Billy Wilder’s The Apartment. It’s the best movie on the ambivalence with which we welcome the end of one year and the coming of a new one, worrying whether it promises that our dreams will come true, whether we will live up to our resolutions to be better. Continue Reading...
December 22, 2022

Sinners, Saints, and Grace in We’re No Angels

Michael Curtiz, famed director of Casablanca, made a Christmas movie in 1955, starring Humphrey Bogart, called We’re No Angels, about the power of innocence and moral decency to transform even hardened criminals—of whom Bogart is one, the other two played by the famous British actor-director Peter Ustinov and the American son of Italian immigrants Aldo Ray. Continue Reading...
December 21, 2022

The Myths of American Individualism

Americans are an individualistic bunch. Our popular culture makes heroes of outsiders, loners, and disrupters. Our politicians emphasize their independence of entrenched institutions, party discipline, and special interests. In economic affairs, we assume that success is within the grasp of anyone who really tries—and harshly judge those who don’t appear to meet the challenge. Continue Reading...