Michael Sean Winters

"The Good Friday accounts remind us never to be too confident about our assessments of what God demands," writes NCR columnist Michael Sean Winters. "Good Friday turned all human presumptions upside down. It still does." 

Former President Donald Trump's frightening remarks on March 25 after losing a court hearing must point us to action, says Michael Sean Winters: "This vindictive, unstable man ought not be invested with civil authority ever again." 

Part of "getting back to normal" means living in a country where politics doesn't dominate the culture. March Madness is a chance to set politics aside for three weekends in a row.

Severing the motivations of Catholic institutions from the actions they perform is an abstraction that doesn't hold up to scrutiny, writes NCR columnist Michael Sean Winters.

Some activists are "clueless about how extreme their positions can be, and how alienating to voters who entertain moral qualms about abortion," writes NCR columnist Michael Sean Winters.

The pope hopes that the synodal process will yield a church in mission, and that mission is proclaiming the Gospel of Jesus Christ.

"Gaudium et spes envisioned a more outward-looking and engaged church, responsive to the signs of the time, and committed to the well-being of the human family," Cardinal Wilton Gregory said in a recent lecture. 

We want a pope who articulates moral issues but no one wants a pope who advocates war or who chooses one part of the human family over another. 

The most important lesson from Joe Biden's State of the Union was the simple fact that we are lucky to have a president who looks back to Franklin Delano Roosevelt for inspiration, writes Michael Sean Winters.

Is there any doubt that Pope Francis holds all these truths of our faith? It is how one holds them that is the issue and the raison d'être for theology. 

As the legal and political debate matured over the past few months, it became clear that the idea of invoking the 14th Amendment was not only anti-democratic but offensive to our notion of justice.

This link between adoration and service has no corollary in the marketplace. Indeed, both adoration and service are impediments to consumerism, and not just impediments but threats.

Media bias didn't win in Michigan, Joe Biden did, and he won big. The media focus on the small vote for "uncommitted" was disproportionate and difficult to explain. 

Many conflicts in American life run along the fault lines between religion and politics, which is quite a different thing, but these two cases explicitly entail church-state issues.

At a time when our politics is so polarized, the need to present Catholic social teaching as pre-political has never been greater, writes NCR columnist Michael Sean Winters. 

This coming Saturday, Feb. 24, marks the second anniversary of Russia's second invasion of Ukraine in this century.

The authors analyze how the Democrats' increasingly radical approach to social and cultural issues further alienates the very working-class voters they need to win elections. 

The book Where Have All the Democrats Gone? looks at how the party of the working class gradually alienated itself from its own base, with disastrous consequences for its electoral viability and for the country.

There may have been scrambled eggs at last week's National Catholic Prayer Breakfast, and there may have been prayer, but the event was partisan, not national, and sectarian, not Catholic.

The prospect of U.S. aid being stalled only emboldens those extremists in Russia and Gaza who think they can wait out the West, and achieve the destruction of their enemies, writes NCR columnist Michael Sean Winters.