Hong Kong Calvary 2021
The news was expected, but that did not make it any less wrenching: newspaper publisher Jimmy Lai, veteran democracy activist Martin Lee, and other brave defenders of human rights were convicted
The World Episcopate and the German Apostasy
As the names Ambrose, Augustine, Athanasius, and John Chrysostom suggest, the middle centuries of the first millennium, the era of the Church Fathers, were the golden age of the Catholic
On Cages and Evangelization in China
Joshua Wong is a young Chinese human rights activist, recently sentenced to 13 and a half months in prison on the Orwellian charge of “incitement to knowingly take part in
The Vatican Should Speak up on China’s Repression in Hong Kong and Beyond
As the democratic world scrambles to devise adequate countermeasures to China’s increasing repression in Hong Kong and beyond, there is one currently disengaged actor that could play a productive role:
The Biases of a Royal Commission
Abrief dip into Latin helps us understand how preconceptions can lead to biased judgments that falsify history—as they did when an Australian Royal Commission on sexual abuse recently impugned the
Audrey Donnithorne: Woman of Valor
The first two sentences of Audrey Donnithorne’s autobiography, China in Life’s Foreground, suggest something of her character, independence of mind, and dry sense of humor: I am an Overseas Brit and
The Vatican’s Choice: Jimmy Lai or XI Jinping?
In mid-May, Chinese leader XI Jinping unveiled a plan to bypass Hong Kong’s legislature and impose draconian new “national security” laws on the former British colony. Putatively intended to defend
“Wittenberg” in Synodal Slow Motion
As Yale’s Carlos Eire masterfully demonstrated in Reformations: The Early Modern World, 1450–1650, there was no one “Protestant Reformation” but rather several religious movements, often in disagreement with each other, that
Doubling Down on a Bad Deal
Perseverance on a difficult but noble path is a virtue. Stubbornness when confronted by irrefutable evidence of a grave mistake is a vice. The latter would seem an apt characterization
Auschwitz and “Intrinsic Evil”
Seventy-five years ago, on January 27, 1945, the infantrymen of the Red Army’s 322nd Rifle Division were bludgeoning their way into the Third Reich when they discovered the Auschwitz-Birkenau extermination
National Interest, National Purpose: Reimagining Morality and Foreign Policy
The following article is based on George Weigel’s Diane Knippers Lecture at the Institute on Religion & Democracy in Washington, DC, on November 19, 2019. On December 29, 1989, the
A Last Chance for Australian Justice
My late parents loved Cardinal George Pell, whom they knew for decades. So I found it a happy coincidence that, on November 12 (which would have been my parents’ 70th
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