What are we to think of the morality of Trump’s arrest of Venezuelan president Nicolás Maduro? Editor R. R. Reno writes that it depends how this action promotes tranquility of order. No matter how it goes, Trump has laid the groundwork for the coming decades of foreign policy.

For further reading: Anyone who read the Trump administration’s annual National Security Strategy (NSS) could have predicted an action like the one Trump took in Venezuela given its heavy emphasis on the Monroe Doctrine. Rusty wrote about this shift in “Trump’s NSS Is a Reality Check.”

From the January issue: Withholding medical care from infants with disabilities is a more common and longstanding practice than most would like to think. Alexander Raikin, who did extensive reporting for this piece, writes, “We must discard a fiction: that infanticide, being illegal, was not historically practiced by physicians in North America.” As human life is further devalued in Canada and the United States, “therapeutic homicide” of infants deemed unworthy to live is becoming mainstream.

For further reading: Raikin’s findings tie into Louise Perry’s diagnosis: “We Are Repaganizing” (October 2023). Her essay begins with a short poem called “Conversation with an Archaeologist”: 

he said they’d found a brothel
on the dig he did last night
I asked him how they know
he sighed:
a pit of babies’ bones
a pit of newborn babies’ bones was how to spot a brothel

When Sarah Reardon visited the Church of the Nativity in Bethlehem as a Protestant college student, she found the place offputting, “hung and cluttered with all the tinsel of man’s devotions,” as a writer before her wrote. But in the years since, the memory has imparted more meaning than the experience itself: “I see, now, that centuries later the nations are still coming to him and to the place of his birth.”

For further reading: Lutheran Rev. Paul T. McCain wrote everything you could want to know about this feast in “The Epiphany of Our Lord” (2010).

Pope Leo XIV issued an apostolic letter dealing with two Vatican II documents about the priesthood. Rev. Msgr. Thomas Guarino critiques the letter in light of the documents it’s based on, concluding that “Leo’s apostolic letter offers solid teaching and wise reflection on many topics. I hope at some point he issues a full-bodied, deeply theological encyclical on the priesthood.”

For further reading: Guarino offered his views on “Vatican II at Sixty” near the anniversary of the council’s close last year.

Listen: Matthew Spalding joins the Conversations podcast to get into the nitty gritty of the Declaration of Independence. Fascinatingly, Spalding unearths a number of rhetorical and literary influences on the document itself. The Founders’ influences are not just the tracts of secular enlightenment.

Upcoming Events

• February 1, 2026: Second Annual Neuhaus Lecture at the New College of Florida: “Recovering the University’s Soul” ft. Bishop Robert Barron | Sarasota, FL. Register here.

• March 5, 2026: Annual D.C. Lecture: “Our Crisis is Metaphysical” ft. Mary Harrington | Washington, D.C. Details coming soon.

Until next time,

VIRGINIA AABRAM

Newsletter Editor