Check out these recent articles from around the web:

Those Were The Days by Michael Sean Winters: “Unless Americans find better ways to navigate their differences than those offered by the culture wars of the past 40 years, we will be little able to confront the large challenges the nation faces.”

On July 23, 1944, Soviet troops found 800,000 pairs of shoes by Toby Thacker: “On July 23 1944, Soviet Army troops discovered the huge Nazi concentration camp of Majdanek just outside the Polish city of Lublin, virtually intact. Along with a few hundred ill and emaciated survivors, they found plentiful evidence that men, women, and children from all over Europe had been brought to this camp by the SS, and that tens of thousands had been murdered there.”

It’s immoral to turn our backs on children in need by Sister Mary Ellen Lacy, DC: “Children fleeing violence and hunger should not be met by irrationally fear-driven protesters waving signs in their faces or news that legislators want to deny them some of their current legal rights. And yet that is what happening in our country, to our shame.”

Anti-Semitic riots in Europe ‘took us back to 1938′ by Terrence McCoy: “In the past few days, a spate of demonstrations that began as peaceful protests against the Israeli invasion and bombing of the Gaza Strip turned violent. Images show smoke-clogged streets, shattered storefronts and police clad in riot gear. They show dozens of youths, some of them masked, clutching smoke bombs and setting trash fires. And they show hatred.”

Strangers at Our Door: Refugees, a Crisis of Conscience for American Christians by Michael Stafford: “Strangers, in desperate need, are arriving at our door. As Christians, we cannot respond with cold hearts and locked gates. We must minister to their suffering by offering them shelter and a share of our own abundance. As Christians, we must welcome them in.”

The Neo-Conservative Imagination: An Interview with Patrick Deneen by Artur Rosman: “Catholics rightly and necessarily opposed the basic premises of Communism, but as a result—forged in that particular historical cauldron—many came to conclude that the only economic alternative was more or less laissez-faire capitalism.  They have tended, then, to read the Church’s teachings on sexual ethics to be inviolable, but Catholic social teachings regarding economics to be a set of broad and even vague guidelines—even, in one instance, warning that one must read only some sentences of Pope Benedict XVI’s encyclical Caritas in Veritate, not others.”

Why the Jesuits (including Pope Francis) are on the frontlines of faith by Matt Emerson: “With the aide of the Spiritual Exercises, which members of the Society of Jesus are required to periodically revisit, a steady stream of Jesuits from nearly every country and background have shaped the culture, politics, and events of their day.”

Will tragedy derail Pope Francis on Christian unity? by John Allen: “It’s reasonable to suspect Palmer would have tried to encourage Francis to deliver even more substantive ecumenical gestures, and given how much this pope takes his cues from his friends, it’s also reasonable to believe Francis would have been receptive. It remains to be seen what will happen now that Palmer is out of the picture. Sometimes tragedy shuts down possibilities, while other times it opens people’s eyes to what must finally be done.”