Many of the groups challenging the contraception mandate in the Affordable Care Act on religious-liberty grounds hang their hopes on one Supreme Court case: Gonzales v. O Centro Espirita Beneficente Uniao do Vegetal. But while the superficial attraction of O Centro is obvious, the facts of the mandate are quite different.

The Bishops' Case Against the Mandate

What the Bishops' Voting Guide Overlooks

In the final installment of our series, William Galston responds to the U.S. Catholic bishops' latest statement on religious freedom. 

Is the Ban on Contraception Just an Identity Marker?

Should Obama have signed the National Defense Authorization Act?

Why immigration officials should steer clear of churches

An exchange

How not to talk about assisted suicide

What can we do to prevent another Tucson?

Benedict & condoms

Why some devout Catholics are leaving the church

In a fit of radical judicial activism, the Montana Supreme Court has ruled that physician-assisted suicide does not violate state law, making Montana the third state (after Oregon and Washington) to legalize the "procedure." 

'Mental reservation,' lying & the Irish sexual-abuse crisis

Why Insurance Is the Wrong Way to Think About Health Care

Obama, Sotomayor, and the wisdom of John Noonan.

  How broad should conscience protections be?

What would the Freedom of Choice Act do?

  Are we in for another thirty years of abortion wars?

  Is there any hope for Tony and his families? Will there be redemption in New Jersey?

 What is habeas corpus and why shouldn’t it be eviscerated—not even in wartime?

 The changelessness of the church is a comforting notion, but hardly an accurate one.

 How should we think about the moral status of the early embryo?

 "When discussing Supreme Court nominees, President George W. Bush has long repeated the mantra: he wants judges who ’will strictly apply the Constitution and laws, not legislate from the bench.’ Yet Bush’s mantra sets up a false dichotomy. Good judges do far more than apply the law; they also interpret it." Cathleen Kaveny on the coming Supreme Court hearings.

John Roberts came from a socially prominent and financially comfortable family. He attended the most prestigious university in the country before going to law school. An expert advocate, he engaged in vigorous debate about legal matters with the chief justice of the highest court in the land. But this John Roberts was never nominated to serve on the U.S. Supreme Court. Instead, he was hanged, drawn, and quartered on December 10, 1610, convicted of the capital offense of being a Catholic priest.

 I have met Pope Benedict XVI only once. It was seventeen years ago, when I was a graduate student at Yale. Richard John Neuhaus had organized an invitation-only conference in New York on biblical interpretation. Among the invited guests were Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, Raymond Brown, the widely respected biblical scholar, and the eminent Lutheran theologian George Lindbeck, my dissertation adviser, who had been a delegated observer at the Second Vatican Council. With the breezy temerity of youth, I wrote Neuhaus (then still Lutheran), and asked to be the “observer from the next generation” at the conference. Much to my amazement, he acceded to my request.

"In her book ’The New Faithful,’ Colleen Carroll asserts that young Catholics take a more conservative approach to matters of faith than their elders do. According to James Davidson and Dean Hoge, that assertion is not supported by the empirical data produced in their study and earlier studies they have conducted."

During his tenure as cardinal archbishop of Boston, Bern­ard Law vigorously defended the position of the Catholic Church on abortion, which is sometimes described as an “unspeakable” act in authoritative church teaching. All the while, it turns out, the cardinal was turning a blind eye to another act that most people consider “unspeakable”-the sexual abuse of children or adolescents by Catholic priests within his archdiocese.

What does the pope have to learn from ’Buffy the Vampire Slayer’? A lot, it turns out—especially about "the new feminism." Cathleen Kaveny reports.