Rochester, Minnesota, referenced a homily given by then-Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger in April 2005, the day before he was ...

In his controversial but surprisingly popular 1987 book The Closing of the American Mind, the philosopher Allan Bloom lamented what he saw to be the decline of intellectual inquiry in America, ...

Relativism, he says, gets "a bad name" from opponents like the church who cast it only as "an anything goes" approach to moral questions. The reality has a much more diverse set of views, he says.

There is a huge cultural and emotional imbalance between America and the rest, especially India, considering our size. We are very interested in America, but America has little interest in us.

At this moment of deep political division, bold ideas to preserve American democracy are more important than ever. The Washington Monthly is an independent voice, listened to by insiders and ...

As you get older, though, and more discerning, you come to realize that there is a reason more Europeans want to come to America than to stay in Europe, for all its cultural advantages.

An illustration of a magnifying glass. An illustration of a magnifying glass.

But what I didn’t expect was how I would encounter cultural surprises among other children of Americans. We, at first, lived in a neighborhood that was made up of about half homes for the Republic of ...

To replace Boas’ and Benedict’s relativism, Kluckhohn proposed a set of ethical and cultural universals that, to my ear, are surprisingly void of content. He drew one example from Benedict’s book, ...