The Rev. Robert Sirico, in The Detroit News today, remembers the faith of slain Archbishop Oscar Romero, whom Pope Francis recently declared a martyr. Rev. Sirico recalls his trip to the church where the Salvadoran archbishop was killed. While on a lecture tour of El Salvador about a year ago, I asked my hosts if it were possible to visit the church where Oscar Romero celebrated his last Mass in 1980. The Salvadorian archbishop was assassinated by a government hit...

When asked by the BBC interviewer what he would say to the terrorists if they were sitting in the studio at that moment, the bishop replied: I would say that any religion starts from a premise of a sanctity of life. And no matter what differences there are, this doesn’t justify by any means the taking of a life and especially so horrifically. I pray for them and I pray that somehow hearts are touched. I’m sure that not everyone...

Today in the United States is the federal holiday known as Washington’s Birthday (not “Presidents Day—see item #1). In honor of George Washington’s birthday, here are 5 things you should know about the day set aside for our America’s founding father. 1. Although some state and local governments and private businesses refer to today as President’s Day, the legal public holiday is designated as “Washington’s Birthday” in section 6103(a) of title 5 of the United States Code. The observance of...

For at least forty years, scientists and policy makers have considered addressing climate related issues by means of climate engineering, or as it monly referred to, geoengineering. A prime example is found in a story published in Newsweek that proposed (albeit with reservations) to use geoengineering to fix a climatic “problem”: Climatologists are pessimistic that political leaders will take any positive action pensate for the climatic change, or even to allay its effects. They concede that some of the more...

Forget the candy hearts, chocolate, the local Cineplex and bistro this weekend. St. Valentine’s Day somehow has been hijacked by Global Disinvestment Day, which means you should protest fossil fuels and encourage shareholders to submit proxy resolutions to leave oil, coal and gas resources untapped. Your significant others are guaranteed to love it because … Gaia. Behind this movement are nominally religious shareholder activists such as As You Sow, as well as the World Council of Churches, filmdom’s The Hulk...

On August 12, 1943, months after having been arrested by the Gestapo and imprisoned, the Lutheran pastor and theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer wrote to his young fiancée Maria von Wedemeyer: When I consider the state of the world, the total obscurity enshrouding our personal destiny, and my present imprisonment, our union—if it wasn’t frivolity, which it certainly wasn’t—can only be a token of God’s grace and goodness, which summon us to believe in him. We would have to be blind not...

“If we’re not heaven benton doing more, we’re hell bent on trying to escapeall the stuff we have to do.” In Evan Koons’concluding vlog on the Economy of Wonder, he tackles the difference between sloth and what Josef Pieper has called “virtuous idleness.” It turns out sloth isn’t just about being lazy or doing nothing or sleeping in till 2. That’s called college. Sloth, at its core, to paraphrase field scholar Josef Pieper, is when we give up on the...

We all use search engines every day. Don’t know a word? Google it. Can’t remember exactly what that restaurant’s address was? Yahoo will know. These search engines (and others) are extremely helpful for our everyday lives; they help us shop, do our jobs, attend to school work and link us to entertainment and games. However, they only scratch the surface of the world wide web. Under that surface is the Dark Web, and it is the playground of human traffickers....

There are two types of ideas that dominate current public discourse—the contrarian and the counterintuitive. A contrarian idea is one that, whether correct or incorrect, opposes or rejects popular opinion or goes against current practice. A counterintuitive idea is one that is contrary to intuition or mon-sense expectation but is nevertheless correct. Getting the two mixed up can have a detrimental effect on society. Take, for example, the increasingly popular contrarian-posing-as-counterintuitive idea that locking up more criminal offenders isn’t making...

What just happened in Libya? Islamic State (IS) released a video on Sunday that appeared to show the beheadings of 21 Egyptian Christians in Libya. The footage showing the deaths of the Egyptian martyrs appeared on the Twitter feed of a website that supports IS. In the video, militants in black marched the captives, dressed in orange overalls, to a beach the group said was near Tripoli, the capital of Libya. The victims—all men—were forced down onto their knees and...