Colman McCarthy

Gene Sharp's research and analysis of nonviolence became the battery that energized the drives of activists who brought down some of the world's most ruthless dictators

After a year of enduring Trump's flaws, the temptation is to focus only on his character defects and not on what truly matters: the serial harmfulness of his personal attacks.

Should you have a liking for antiwar agitators who dizzyingly stay on message, protest after protest and arrest after arrest, you might sign on with Bob Graf. The Milwaukee-based former Jesuit scholastic who has close ties to the Catholic Worker, was and is the organizing force behind a national campaign to rid the Reserve Officers Training Corps (ROTC) at Catholic universities and colleges.

The still current displays of hate and violence by the Klan in Charlottesville, Virginia, stoked memories of my student days at Spring Hill when I was an English major and philosophy minor from 1956 to 1960.

For a large portion of those who took in the 10-part documentary by Ken Burns and Lynn Novick on the Vietnam War, the hellscape events of those years must have seemed like ancient history. The first American deaths were in 1959, the last in 1974: 58,220 in all. Total military and civilian deaths were 3.4 million.​

The 1960s and Vatican II compelled Charlie Sullivan to leave the priesthood and pursue social justice; he soon met Pauline Fox, and together as husband and wife they have been lobbying successfully for prison reforms rooted in Matthew 25 for decades.

Washington may be a swamp and the White House at new lows, but this summer the D.C. team, the Nationals, romps on a field of dreams. Homers are common, whiffs rare.