Colleen Carroll Campbell is a St. Louis-based author, former presidential speechwriter and television and radio host of "Faith & Culture" on EWTN. Her website is www.colleen-campbell.com.
The story related in last week’s Pennsylvania grand jury report had all the ingredients of a classic sex abuse scandal: a popular, successful authority figure suspected for years of molesting boys, a host of higher-ups unwilling to report him to police and a trail of vulnerable children left to suffer unspeakable violations while powerful adults […]
Most news reports about Mississippi’s proposed “personhood amendment” have cast the measure’s pro-life sponsors as the aggressors in a brand-new phase of the abortion wars, one in which abortion opponents rely on clever linguistic tricks to launch an unprecedented attack on abortion rights. That storyline omits one important fact: Abortion-rights advocates are the ones who […]
In August, when HBO released a documentary about feminist icon Gloria Steinem, critics knew in advance what to expect. HBO executive Sheila Nevins made it clear that the finished product would be not biography but hagiography, “an inspirational film about St. Gloria,” as she put it in one interview. The film lived up to its billing, […]
Catholics make up about a quarter of the American electorate and have backed the popular-vote winner in every presidential election since 1972. That track record continued through 2008: While weekly churchgoing Catholics slightly favored Sen. John McCain, Catholics as a whole backed President Barack Obama by a margin of 54 to 45 percent. Given the […]
The college years used to be known as a time to explore new ideas, adopt new identities and embrace — and discard — new affiliations. You could arrive on campus a political conservative and leave a liberal; enter a staunch atheist and exit a devout believer; declare yourself a biology major, then switch to theater […]
Televangelist Pat Robertson made another high-profile gaffe last week when he told a caller on “The 700 Club” show that a husband who is tempted to cheat on his Alzheimer’s-stricken wife ought to leave her for someone new. “I know it sounds cruel,” Robertson said, “but if he’s going to do something, he should divorce […]
So plopping your preschooler in front of the television to gawk at “SpongeBob SquarePants” — a frenetic cartoon featuring scene changes every 11 seconds — impairs his attention span. Who could have guessed? This astonishing revelation comes courtesy of the Pediatrics journal of the American Academy of Pediatrics. The journal recently published a study showing […]
Poor President Obama. All he wanted to do was deliver a jobs speech to Congress. How were he and his staff supposed to know that their chosen time and date happened to be exactly the same as that of a long-planned Republican presidential debate, where his aspiring rivals planned to highlight his failure to create […]
Ten years ago this month, after a band of radical Islamists crashed airplanes into the Twin Towers, the Pentagon and a Pennsylvania field, religion surged to the forefront of our national conversation. The twisted, hateful beliefs of the terrorists came into sharp focus, of course. But so did the generous, life-affirming faith of their victims […]
Another World Youth Day has come and gone, and with it, all the usual speculation about what it means. Ever since the late Pope John Paul II launched the international faith festival in 1984 by welcoming 300,000 young Catholics to Rome, the chattering classes have struggled to account for its appeal. That struggle continued last […]
For fatherhood in America, these are the best of times and the worst of times. So says a new Pew Research Center report on fathering trends. The report, released in June, found that today’s fathers are active in their children’s daily lives to a degree not seen in nearly half a century. Live-in dads now […]
In 1968, Stanford biologist Paul R. Erlich opened his bestselling book, “The Population Bomb,” with this declaration: “The battle to feed all of humanity is over. In the 1970s and 1980s hundreds of millions of people will starve to death in spite of any crash programs embarked upon now. At this late date nothing can […]
The death of Terri Schindler Schiavo in 2005 is a distant memory for most Americans. But for the family that spent seven years fighting Terri’s estranged husband and the court system to stop the starvation of their daughter and sister, recollections of the 13 days Terri lingered without food or water before finally succumbing to […]
Move over, Sarah Palin. Michele Bachmann is the new bogeyman — er, woman — of the left. She opposes pornography and abortion. She’s stingy with the taxpayer money entrusted to her. There are even rumors that she gets headaches — really, really bad headaches. As for her family values, well, yes, Bachmann and her husband […]
She was the perfect villainess: a callous, self-centered, derelict mother straight out of central casting. When her toddler daughter disappeared, she partied for a month without reporting the child missing. Then she blamed everyone from a fictional nanny to her own parents for the demise of the little girl whose remains eventually were found rotting […]
In the political battle that ended last week with New York’s legalization of gay marriage, Catholic defenders of man-woman marriage found themselves pitted against an unlikely batch of adversaries: fellow Catholics. Gov. Andrew Cuomo — who, like his father, has spent his career touting his Catholic credentials while ignoring church teachings that clash with his […]
After waiting nearly three years to dig through Sarah Palin’s 13,000-plus old emails, journalists searching for juicy headlines from her brief tenure as Alaska’s governor were left empty-handed. The 300 pounds of printed correspondence dumped on the public this month revealed little new information aside from Palin’s fondness for exclamation points and faux-curse words like […]
Deep dish or thin crust? Leno or Conan? And people say American civic discourse is no longer serious. What could be more serious than the choice presented to former Minnesota Gov. Tim Pawlenty at Monday night’s Republican presidential debate, between Coke and Pepsi? (For the record, Pawlenty prefers Coke.) The debate, hosted by CNN and […]
He was the wrong messenger for the right message. Judging by the obituaries published since his death from pulmonary thrombosis last week, that seems to be the mainstream media consensus on Dr. Jack Kevorkian, the 83-year-old pathologist who helped kill more than 130 people during his decades-long campaign for assisted suicide. Although “Dr. Death” might […]
Doomsday radio evangelist Harold Camping was wrong; the world did not end [two weekends ago]. But you could hardly tell from looking at Joplin [that] Sunday night, after the deadliest U.S. tornado in 60 years wiped out at least 122 lives and some 2,000 buildings. The apocalyptic storm that struck this southwest Missouri town left all […]
Spring is wedding season, and though few celebrations can top last month’s royal wedding, plenty of brides hope to give Kate Middleton a run for her tiara. The $27,800 price tag for the average American wedding may be chump change compared to the $32 million royal nuptials, but it’s enough to drive an $86-billion-a-year wedding […]
The swiftness of Pope John Paul II’s rise from popular pope to “Blessed John Paul” […] sparked widespread debate in advance of his beatification [Divine Mercy] Sunday. Critics charge that his failures in addressing the clergy sex abuse crisis should disqualify him from beatification, or at least stall the process. Defenders say his administrative shortcomings do not […]
In his engaging new biography, Johnny Appleseed: The Man, the Myth, the American Story, journalist Howard Means scrubs away nearly two centuries of rumor and myth to uncover the truth about 19th-century pioneer nurseryman John Chapman, a national folk hero whom most of us know only from Disney cartoons and children’s books. Means’ meticulous research […]
The crime alone was heinous enough. According to police in Cleveland, Texas, an 11-year-old girl there was gang raped six times last fall by a total of at least 19 assailants, some of them boys, some of them ex-cons more than twice her age. Her assailants documented their attacks using cell phone videos and photos […]
