The Catholic Church — the role of the papacy in particular — first caught my attention when I was a semi-lapsed Protestant attending a quintessentially secular, Marxist-leaning university in Boston.

Both clinical wisdom and empirical research agree that the more we fixate on happiness, the more elusive it becomes. In essence, if a mind continually measures its own joy, it will, slowly but surely, ...

Many of us have, at times, failed to pursue a goal, even an important one. We want to get in shape and join a gym, only to let our membership lapse and spend our evenings on the couch instead. Or we ...