Why is anti-abortion violence spiking–with George Tiller’s death at the hands of alleged shooter Scott Roeder just the latest and most high-profile episode? Jon A. Shields, an assistant professor of government at Claremont McKenna College and author of an intriguing new book, “The Democratic Virtues of the Christian Right,” finds an explanation in the history…

In a commentary today, First Things editor and Creighton theologian R.R. Reno parses the justifications for killing an abortion doctor like George Tiller, and finds that alleged murderer Scott Roeder came up short–though barely. Reno says that “The blanket condemnation [by Catholics bishops and others] of ‘violence’ seems unhelpfully expansive” and so he wants to explain that the…

The pope meets with children every year about this time, taking a few questions and providing rare–and affecting–personal insights that he doesn’t offer up elsewhere. Last Saturday he met with 7,000 children from the Holy Childhood Association, which is affiliated with the Vatican’s Congregation for the Evangelization of Peoples. Benedict chose from three pre-screened questions. (He’s…

“Liberal Catholicism is an exhausted project,” Chicago Cardinal Francis George famously said more than a decade ago. As noted earlier, the eminent church historian John O’Malley argues that Barack Obama could be reviving the “spirit of Vatican II” that is associated with a “progressive” Catholicism currently out of favor in Rome. At PoliticsDaily, the much less eminent journalism hack, David…

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