Recently while visiting the sick I spent some time in a section of the hospital for dementia patients waiting to be transferred to a nursing home. It is one of my favorite sections to visit. On this particular day, a...
Editor’s note: This is a long-form essay in five parts, all published simultaneously below. The word count is around 12,400. Part 1 The liturgical path of the Church after Vatican II Introduction The Second Vatican Council, a watershed in the...
Editor’s note: In recent years, the Church’s teaching on the death penalty has been a topic of much debate among Catholics, especially in the United States where the practice is still legal. In this essay, “Capital Punishment and Magisterial Authority,”...
I have written several times for Where Peter Is about issues facing Indigenous communities, including regarding the so-called “doctrine of discovery” and, in collaboration with my close friend Meredith Dawson, regarding related problems that emerged during Pope Francis’s visit to...
One word which Pope Francis has made very much his own in the course of his pontificate is the Greek rhetorical term parrhesia. Etymologically it is a noun that means something like ‘complete speech’ – saying everything, leaving nothing unsaid –...
In my last essay, I took aim at Pelagianism, a heresy from Late Antiquity, which Pope Francis has frequently targeted in its perceived modern forms in his teaching. In this essay I will discuss Gnosticism, the other major heresy whose...
My great-grandfather, Pawel Turowsky, came to the United States from the Russian Empire in 1907. Two years before, the failed Russian Revolution of 1905—harbinger of the successful Revolution twelve years later—had been brutally crushed by the Tsar’s forces. A wave...
The Rise of Historical Absolutism The New York Times recently profiled Susanna Ceccardi, the new right-wing populist mayor of a previously left-wing town in central Italy, as part of a series on the rise of populist politics in Europe. Much...
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