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(Photo by Yasin Ozturk/Anadolu Agency via Getty Images.) It’s been years since I’ve seen Americans so united by grief and fury. The grief is for the 19 children and 2 teachers murdered at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas. The fury is against the police officers who waited—minute after agonizing minute—while the killer hid behind a locked classroom door.  The facts are almost too painful to recount. According to the latest timelines, at 11:33 a.m. on Tuesday, May 24, the Uvalde mass shooter (I’ve adopted a practice of refusing to name spree killers) entered the school and began shooting into classroom 111 or 112. Two minutes later, at 11:35 a.m., three Uvalde officers arrived at the closed classroom door. Two were lightly wounded by gunfire from the shooter. Four more officers a...

The Ascension can seem like the strangest event in the life of Christ. Some great pieces of Ascension art emphasize that strangeness, picturing a pair of feet at the top of a picture with astonished Apostles looking up at the floating figure of Christ. But if you think about it, it would have been even stranger if he stayed. Here are 10 reasons I can count. If he stayed he would be hard to reach. If Jesus remained on earth, we would probably all go on pilgrimage to see him in his bodily form at least once in our lives. It would become a great story, like a Papal encounter. But we wouldn’t meet him daily. If he stayed, this world would be the most important. It is easy to think that this world is all there is. But we are made not for this world, but the next, and we long for it until it com...

ROME – Speaking about the need to welcome, accompany, promote, and integrate migrants when they arrive in a new country, Pope Francis said that when it comes to the United States, “a people of migrants,” the Irish brought the whiskey and the Italians brought the mafia. To understand migrants today, the pope said, the only thing most people have to do is look to their own roots because “most of us are children or grandchildren of migrants,” himself included, as his parents arrived in Argentina from northern Italy. Recalling a dialogue with “someone from the United States” who told him that Americans are not migrants because “we have already rooted here,” Francis repeated the answer he gave then: “Don’t lose your memory: You are a people of migrants, of Irish migrants and Italian migrants. T...

When the Columbine High School massacre took place in 1999 it was seen as a watershed moment in the United States – the worst mass shooting at a school in the country’s history. Now, it ranks fourth. The three school shootings to surpass its death toll of 13 – 12 students, one teacher – have all taken place within the last decade: 2012’s Sandy Hook Elementary attack, in which a gunman killed 26 children and school staff; the 2018 shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, which claimed the lives of 17 people; and now the Robb Elementary School assault in Uvalde, Texas, where on May 24, 2022, at least 19 children and two adults were murdered. We are criminologists who study the life histories of public mass shooters in the U.S. As part of that research, we built ...