Check out these recent articles from around the web:

Pope Francis the troublemaker by Michael Gerson: “Over the millennia, this strain of impatience with legalism has provided Christianity with an advantage. When the church becomes ossified, legalistic and hypocritical — as all institutions periodically do — it is the radical reformers who carry on its most authentic tradition.”

Reflections on the Jesuit Interview with Pope Francis by Steve Schneck: “Pope Francis overwhelms us. He sweeps away barricades that twenty years of culture war have thrown up between Catholics. The canned worldviews into which so many of us have hunkered down – the ideologies of right and left – just melt away with this guy.”

Pope Francis’ New Balance by R.R. Reno: “Pope Francis encourages a more balanced view of our present circumstances. Yes, some bad, very bad dimensions. But also some good, very good dimensions. We’re to navigate judiciously, neither condemning broadly, nor naively affirming the status quo. This balance is needed.”

Subsidizing Farmers But Not the Poor Still Evil by Jonathan Chait: “Is the ‘work requirement’ they plan to impose on food stamps like welfare reform? There are three highly salient differences. Welfare benefits were specifically designed in a way, dating from their origin as a replacement for a male breadwinner, that discouraged work. Second, welfare reform had funds for jobs and training programs. Third, it was passed in a full employment economy.”

Me? A Neo-con? by Michael Sean Winters: “Our fellow men and women on this planet are not pawns in a game of real politique. Their needs cannot be ignored behind a curtain of isolationist exhaustion. The world still needs to aspire to create regimes that are built on liberal principles of freedom of speech, freedom of religion, freedom from want and freedom from fear.”

Caritas by Cardinal Donald Wuerl: “All human community is rooted in God’s plan that brings us into ever-widening circles of relationship – first with our parents, then our family, the Church, and finally a variety of community experiences.  We cannot find fulfillment unless we have some community with others, a community in which we serve and are served, love and are loved.”

50-Year Sentence Upheld for Ex-President of Liberia by NY Times: “An international panel of appeals judges unanimously upheld a 50-year prison sentence on Thursday given to Charles G. Taylor, the former president of Liberia, for committing war crimes and crimes against humanity in a case cast as a watershed for modern human rights law.”

Children and Guns: The Hidden Toll by NY Times: “Children shot accidentally — usually by other children — are collateral casualties of the accessibility of guns in America, their deaths all the more devastating for being eminently preventable. They die in the households of police officers and drug dealers, in broken homes and close-knit families, on rural farms and in city apartments. Some adults whose guns were used had tried to store them safely; others were grossly negligent. Still others pulled the trigger themselves, accidentally fracturing their own families while cleaning a pistol or hunting. And there are far more of these innocent victims than official records show.”