Thomas Jefferson

Distinctly Catholic: As we prepare to celebrate the nation's birthday, the idea of America is being contested on terrain we thought was in our past, with the resurgence of a racially tinged understanding of the American nation.

Distinctly Catholic: Whether the issue is reparations or the Bladensburg Cross, the desire to rummage around the past, with no sense of how culture has changed in the meantime, is ill-advised. Healthy political parties and cultural institutions seek converts, and unhealthy ones seek heretics.

Michael Sean Winters rounds up political news and commentary: Smart and not-so-smart takes on abortion; Catholics and labor leaders in Las Vegas; "Don't forget the poor" in the Amazon.

When the 116th Congress was sworn in, it became one of the most religiously diverse delegations in American history. But the incoming class of legislators is predominantly Christian — even more so than the country itself.

Distinctly Catholic: In Self-Evident Truths, historian Richard Brown deftly catalogs the shift that led to the triumph of white supremacist views in the first half of the 19th century.

Distinctly Catholic: In Self-Evident Truths, Richard Brown's examination of how religious equality manifested itself in the years after the Revolution is especially fascinating.

Distinctly Catholic: In contrast to the current penchant for the lens of group victimization, King's identity politics were morally redemptive because he invoked universalist impulses.

We have never fully confronted white complicity as a church. Although there is no metric that demonstrates black and brown people achieving equality in any significant way, white people are enraged by any perceived slippage in their own superiority.