Our April 11 issue has just been posted to the website. Among the highlights: “The Odd Couple” (subscription), John Wilkins’s piece on the upcoming canonizations of John XXIII and John Paul II and how the legacies of these two very different popes relate to each other.

Both popes brought about revolutions, John XXIII in the church, John Paul II in the world. When John called a council, he was asked why it was needed, since popes were infallible now. The story is that he went over to a window in his study and flung it open: The church needed fresh air. …

John Paul II’s revolution started at once. His 1978 inaugural sermon in St. Peter’s Square electrified Eastern Europeans, who, watching it on television and hearing it on radio, could discern what it portended, and it emboldened some evangelical pastors daunted by secular culture in the West as they sought to proclaim Jesus Christ. John Paul II showed them how. “Open wide the doors for Christ!” he exhorted. “To his saving power open the boundaries of states, economic and political systems, the vast fields of culture, civilization, and development!

“Do not be afraid! Christ knows what is in man. He alone knows it.”

Read the whole thing here.

Also in the new issue: George Scialabba on Thomas Paine and Edmund Burke; John Garvey on Audrey Assad and what’s lost when faith is identified with fundamentalism (subscription); Celia Wren on the new TV series Fargo (subscription); and Kaitlin Campbell’s Last Word on "becoming a character-composite of every nun I knew" to make it through a few tense moments at a lonely Oakland bus stop (subscription). See the entire table of contents here.