Perhaps one of the more sensitive personal issues you can raise with people is that of dress.

A "factoid" was brought to my attention by the Italian journalist Giulio Meotti.

Did you have a good Easter weekend? If so, it wasn't Christian.

I cheer the non-experts.

In his diagnosis of the "malaises of modernity," the philosopher Charles Taylor claims that our disenchanted culture suffers from a lack of depth, particularly obvious "in what should be the crucial moments of life: birth, marriage, death."

No time or society, I imagine, is entirely without its ironies or contradictions. 

In the winter months, it would be salutary for people young and old to put down their iPods and other electronic devices and tell each other stories. 

Re-reading the last volume of Parkman's massive work, France and England in North America, I was struck by his keen insight into the future.

In 1988 as Pope John Paul II began his speech to the European Parliament, Ian Paisley, a member for Northern Ireland, shouted that the pope was the Antichrist. 

In Independence Hall is preserved a chair crafted in 1779 by the cabinetmaker John Folwell, with a sun on the horizon carved at the top.