A fine recent article on the late Renaissance painter Caravaggio* reminded me that artistic brilliance may not always be matched by moral achievement. This is a problem that plagues everyone in every walk in life, but it is particularly annoying when the moral reputation of an artist stands between his work and our ability to appreciate it...

In robotics, as in so many things, small is beautiful. The trouble is that making them really small is very nearly impossible. “Building robots that operate independently at sizes below one millimeter is incredibly difficult,” says roboticist Marc Miskin at the University of Pennsylvania. “The field has essentially been stuck on this problem for 40 years.”

For generations, the archbishop of New York has held a singular place in the life of the Catholic Church in the United States — standing at the crossroads of culture, conscience and public witness. Few shepherds embodied that national role more clearly than Cardinal John O’Connor, who died in May 2000 after nearly 16 years as archbishop of New York...

Coming a few days after Christmas 2025, the protests erupting in Iran caught much of the Western world by surprise. Of course, Iran has had major protests before (2009-2010, 2011, 2019-2020, 2022-2023), which have often been brutally suppressed by the Islamic Republic’s security forces. This time, however, the protests appear to have been even larger...

In an undelivered address to cardinals last week, Cardinal Arthur Roche planned to voice opposition to the traditional Roman Rite, which he sees as a concession that needs to be eventually phased out in favor of the post-Vatican II liturgy as the unique expression of the Latin Rite. In a two-page text on Traditionis Custodes...

In his letter to the Colossians, St. Paul provides a blueprint for assenting to a new life wholly dedicated to Christ. He prefaces his proposal by telling us that if we have been raised by Christ, then we must seek the things from above, where Christ is seated at the right hand of God. He confirms his position by reminding us to set our minds on things that are above, not in things that are on earth...

Eight centuries before Christ, that part of the kingdom where the tribes of Zebulun and Naphtali lived was attacked by the Assyrians, and the tribes were hauled off into captivity. It marked the beginning of the kingdom’s end. The Davidic empire finally crumbled in the sixth century BC, when Jerusalem was seized by Babylon and the remaining tribes were driven into exile...

The University of Notre Dame plans to install as director of a university-wide institute a scholar who has described laws prohibiting abortion as “violence,” “sexual abuse” and “trauma” and has linked efforts to end abortion to white supremacy. “Abortion access is freedom-enhancing, in the truest sense of the word,” states a column in Salon co-authored by Susan Ostermann...

Given how much of life is taken up with work, I think we give too little reflection to a key question: what really is, or should be, the point of our working? We often undertake our work simply as something that must be done. But the intention and so also the spirit with which we do it makes a significant and even essential difference...

A Catholic priest who worked with Alex Pretti, the man shot and killed by federal agents in Minnesota, said he was known for his “kindness” and disputed the narrative of top Trump administration officials that he was a violent “domestic terrorist” and would-be assassin. Pretti, an ICU nurse, was shot while filming federal officers on a Minneapolis street on Jan. 24...