Ryan, Obama, and the Poverty of Community
“The individual today is often suffocated between two poles represented by the State and the marketplace” (Pope John Paul II, Centesimus Annus #49). The 2012 U.S. presidential campaign has, to a degree...
View ArticleChristian Reconstructionism and Election 2012
Analysts largely agree: Christian Reconstructionism has been growing on the religious right. The older model of the Moral Majority (Christian “influence” in society) has largely given way to the new...
View ArticlePoor People’s Campaign? — Douglas F. Ottati
The number of people in the U.S. living below the poverty line in 2011 was 46.2 million, the highest in the more than 50 years that records have been kept.[i] (1961 is a few years before Lyndon...
View ArticleWhy I watched Robin Hood instead of the debate
When presented with the choice of curling up on the couch with my beloved and our two still-at-home kids to watch Robin Hood or going off alone to watch the presidential debate on-line, it was a...
View ArticleVoting and Alienation
Four years ago, I was an idealistic college student who believed in change. Frustrated with the years of Bush-style imperialism and capitalism, I was ready for some big government and the return of...
View ArticleResurrection and Gun Control
A little over a month after the shooting at Newtown Elementary School which left twenty young children and six staff members dead, President Obama today offered bold Presidential leadership for a...
View ArticleThe Problem with “Together” in Obama’s Second Inaugural Address
Four years ago, Barack Obama presented himself as offering a new style of politics. His first inaugural address promised a post-partisan administration. He began by laying out problems facing the...
View ArticleAmerican Exceptionalism Re-Envisioned: Barack Obama’s Second Inaugural Address
By R. Ward Holder and Peter B. Josephson In April 2009 President Obama was asked about the concept of American exceptionalism, a notion traditionally bound up with manifest destiny and the image of...
View ArticleThe Limits of Drones, the Law, and Obama
President Obama’s recent speech at the National Defense University was billed as a major speech on US counterterrorism policy, especially on drones and Guantanamo. The New York Times was among those...
View ArticleThe revolution against the state – something to celebrate this Fourth of July
As the Fourth of July, the 237th anniversary of America’s famous epoch-staging revolution against Britain arrives, the world is gripped by the strangest of ironies in this strangest of times. The...
View ArticleSurveillance, the Church, and the Prophet’s Mantle
This post takes the form of a critical response to “First They Came for the Whistleblowers,” an op-ed by my friend Chris Iosso over at Unbound: An Interactive Journal of Christian Social Justice....
View ArticleThe Work of Prudential Judgment: Another Perspective on Syria from Catholic...
On Saturday, Sept. 7, 2013, Catholics, Christians of other denominations, and women and men of good will observed a day of prayer and fasting in response to the humanitarian crisis in Syria, at the...
View ArticleAsking a Different Question
Last night in his second national address on the global response to the use of chemical weapons in Syria, President Obama asserted: “If we fail to act, the Assad regime will see no reason to stop using...
View ArticleMarch, Osage County – What Ukraine Reveals About our Dysfunctional Family of...
Viewing the film August: Osage County with academy award nominees Julia Roberts and Meryl Streep during the same week that Russia’s Vladimir Putin occupied Crimea and thumbed his nose at President...
View ArticleVoting and Alienation
Four years ago, I was an idealistic college student who believed in change. Frustrated with the years of Bush-style imperialism and capitalism, I was ready for some big government and the return of...
View ArticleThe Scarecrow in the Cucumber Field – ISIL, Ebola, and the End of the World...
In his best-selling book Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed (Penguin, 2011), popular science author Jared Diamond meticulously and relentlessly plunges into a wide variety of historical...
View ArticleThe Middle East and the Unintended Consequences of Our “Willful Ignorance”
The words that may turn out over time to have many of the same ominous undertones as Neville Chamberlain’s “peace in our time” was uttered this past week by Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn, former head of the...
View ArticleThe Decline of Democracy and the Coming of the Strongman
Russian President Vladmir Putin’s bold military intrusion into the Syrian civil war and tycoon Donald Trump’s unanticipated and too-easily-dismissed electoral ascent share a similar genesis, which in...
View ArticleAmerican Exceptionalism Re-Envisioned: Barack Obama’s Second Inaugural Address
By R. Ward Holder and Peter B. Josephson In April 2009 President Obama was asked about the concept of American exceptionalism, a notion traditionally bound up with manifest destiny and the image of...
View ArticleThe Limits of Drones, the Law, and Obama
President Obama’s recent speech at the National Defense University was billed as a major speech on US counterterrorism policy, especially on drones and Guantanamo. The New York Times was among those...
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