John Courtney Murray

Distinctly Catholic: The bishops can seize this moment and embrace a more nuanced, and frankly more theologically sophisticated understanding of religious liberty, or they can pick fights with the president, straining our supple theology to cohere with an intransigent political agenda.

NCR Connections: We are troubled by organizations that target voters by collecting mobile phone location data when they go to Sunday Mass and also by conferences like a recent one at Boston College that includes academics and bishops but takes place behind closed doors.

Distinctly Catholic: Steven Waldman's new book Sacred Liberty examines the rekindling of anti-Catholic persecution in the early 19th century. What he does not do is distinguish between a denial of religious freedom and religious bigotry. 

Book Review: This book is recommended to anyone who struggles to understand the meaning of the Second Vatican Council and who is not enlightened by the polarized antagonisms of recent decades. 

Patrick Creadon's new documentary, "Hesburgh," depicts a priest who raised the bar for higher education in the United States, especially for how Catholic colleges and universities would encounter the ideas and realities of the modern world.

Distinctly Catholic: Laudatory but not hagiographic, this new film about Notre Dame's late president chronicles his enormous influence in the latter half of the 20th century.

Book Review: We live in a world where the secular and the religious exist side by side, where they might and should dialogue, and indeed where the denizens of a religious worldview also inhabit the saeculum.  

Distinctly Catholic: Why does George conclude that it is sex that is the "poison in the bloodstream of the Church" and not the sin of pride of the bishops who covered it up?