From the Editors

Photo ID requirements not only act as a de facto poll tax; they address a virtually nonexistent problem. Concerns about voter fraud are wildly overblown.

Americans who don't have a narrative sense of the country's history are more susceptible to ideologues who try to weave their own versions of the past.

There are two ways to reduce the federal budget deficit: cut spending and increase revenue. Serious progress will require both. But neither can solve the larger problem behind the nation's budget woes.

It's useful to meet the argument that torture works with the facts: actually, there is not much evidence that it does. In the end, however, the question is not whether torture is ever useful but whether it is morally permissible.

St. Cyprian said that we can't have God as our Father if we don't have the church as our mother. It seems, however, that we live in an age in which people are less inclined to become church members—even when they are happy to have some church associations.

Imagine you are a young mother living paycheck to paycheck, with no health insurance. Where would you go for a pregnancy test? For treatment of a sexually transmitted disease? To obtain contraceptives? In each case, the answer for millions of Americans is Planned Parenthood.

Paul Ryan is using the deficit as an excuse to shrink the government via tax relief for the rich and program cuts that largely target the poor—while sparing military spending. That isn't courageous; it's simply wrong.

Paying taxes in this country is ordinarily accompanied by much grumbling. But paying taxes is not just a legal duty but a moral opportunity.

Many national leaders talk about cutting spending so as not to burden future generations with  deficits. They seem to have no problem, however, burdening the next generation with an overheated Earth.

The attack on public unions could deliver a virtual knockout blow to the union movement, and that would be a blow to all workers.

No one knows how the Egyptian drama will play out. But it has so far confirmed the extraordinary power that can be exerted by ordinary people when they are organized, determined and peaceful.

Formation in faith does not happen by accident. It happens when churches puts commitment and creativity into the process and believe that the Holy Spirit is sure to show up.

In the face of yet another gun massacre, Americans seem to think that there is only one answer: more guns.

With its widening gap between the rich and the poor, the decline of its middle class and crises in its health care and educational systems, the U.S. is no longer the golden land of opportunity.

It may seem hyperbolic for the Southern Poverty Law Center to add large and highly visible advocacy organizations to the list of hate groups it monitors. But not all hate comes from the fringe.

Christian history in the region goes back to the earliest days of the church. As late as the eighth century, Baghdad—not Rome or Constantinople—might have been declared the center of Christianity.

The glory of American politics is that voters get to "throw the rascals out"—whether or not they understand who the rascals are or the nature of the crisis the nation is in. Very little could have done by any government during this worldwide economic slowdown to address the high unemployment, except more government stimulus, which is what voters say they don't want.