Posted today to the homepage, Joseph Sorrentino with a web exclusive on La Caravana de los Mutilados (“the Caravan of the Mutilated”), a group of seventeen Honduran men currently traveling through Mexico to call awareness to the dangers of traveling north toward the United States on the train called La Bestia. “Along the way,” Sorrentino writes, “they’re holding protests and meetings to warn people about the dangers of riding the train. They also hope to pressure their government to help any Honduran maimed by La Bestia.” Their ultimate destination: Washington, D.C., where they hope to bring their case directly to Barack Obama. Read all of “Maimed by the Beast” here.

Also today, E. J. Dionne Jr. on the forty-seven Republican senators whose letter to Iran, written “in strangely condescending language that a good civics teacher would never use,” is not just “a blatant effort to blow up the negotiations” but also “makes Congress and the United States look foolish to the world.” Read all of “The Senate’s 47 Percent” here.

Also now featured on the website, an excerpt from Cardinal Walter Kasper's new book, Pope Francis’s Revolution of Tenderness and Love:

Pope Francis’s style is correctly understood against the background of the theology of the people. This style is not good-natured folksiness or even cheap populism. Behind the pope’s pastoral style, which is close to the people, stands an entire theology, indeed a mysticism of the people. For him the church is far more than an organic and hierarchical institution. It is above all the people of God on their way to God, a pilgrim and evangelizing people that transcends every (however necessary) institutional expression.

Read all of “Open House” here.