The Wall Street Journal

It was announced last week that the Catholic Church would canonize an Aztec peasant who saw visions of the Virgin Mary near Mexico City in 1531. The decision is not startling in itself -- Juan Diego's miraculous accounts have long been known and credited among believers -- but it is likely to have a wider, symbolic meaning for American Catholics. Their church is changing, and Mexico's "Brown Virgin," Our Lady of Guadalupe, is likely to play a bigger part in… more

It is odd that so much of the national debate over immigration is driven by nostalgia, given how pressingly urgent the subject is right now, and how important to the nation's future.

From certain people we hear the yearning for an idealized era when shop stewards met radical immigrant workers on loading docks. From this group come the researchers who would rather lament the loss of well-paying, unionized, blue-collar jobs than discover new paths of upward mobility.

Others, in the meantime, delude… more

Dr. Michael West, the lead scientist on the team that recently cloned the first human embryos, believes his mission in life is "to end suffering and death." "For the sake of medicine," he informs us, "we need to set our fears aside." For the sake of health, in other words, we need to overcome our moral inhibitions against cloning and eugenics.

The human cloning announcement was not a shock. We have been "progressing" down this road for years, while averting our… more

America's war on terrorism may shock the political structure of the Middle East to a degree unseen since the collapse of the Ottoman Empire after World War I and the collapse of European colonial rule after World War II. But those who believe the region can be remade in America's democratic image are seeing not the Middle East itself, but the Middle East as an extension of our own domestic obsessions and unique historical experience.

From Morocco on the Atlantic --… more

President Bush had barely finished outlining his ideas on national missile defense yesterday when the critics started ranting. The 1980s' nuclear freezenik Gary Milhollin resurfaced on CNN, declaring, … more

America's blind faith in progress is the result of our geographical and historical good fortune. Meanwhile, large swaths of the Earth have seen a decline in order and development in recent … more

Israelis will continue to disagree in the coming election campaign over the different approaches to the Palestinians advocated by Prime Minister Ehud Barak and Likud Party leader … more

Attorney General Janet Reno and FBI Director Louis Freeh lobbied Congress yesterday to expand the federal role in the battle against Internet crime. The Clinton administration … more

In his State of the Union address tonight, President Clinton plans to ask Congress for as much as $50 million to provide computers and Internet access to poor households. Earlier this month Bill Bradley bemoaned the comparatively low rates of Internet access among such groups; Al Gore frequently boasts … more