Author: Andrew Sorokowski

Five years ago, a colleague and I conducted an informal and not very systematic survey of the Ukrainian Catholic community in the United States. Not surprisingly, the sample, which was weighted toward older individuals, revealed a religiously committed and active population. As we noted then, however, we still need a professional sociological survey of our...

A statue of military and political leader Symon Petliura (1879-1926) was unveiled in Vinnytsia, Ukraine, on October 14, Defender of Ukraine Day. It is hardly aggressive: Petliura is neither standing nor astride a warhorse, but sitting with a map of Ukraine in his hands. The monument is sited in an area known as Yerusalymka, some...

A commentary on the website of the Stockholm-based Gapminder Foundation (as in “mind the gap – in your knowledge”), which encourages the proper understanding and use of statistics on global development, notes that one source of our misconceptions is notions we acquired in school that are no longer true, or at least have become questionable....

The recent tragedy in Charlottesville, Va., together with the removal of statues of Robert E. Lee in the United States and of Vladimir I. Lenin in Ukraine, raise questions about how we should deal with historical monuments and other symbols. We shall not take the easy route by declaring that all monuments to objectionable individuals...

Every few years Prof. Dr. Dr. Ivan Khval’ko-Yerundovych – despite his two doctorates, an entry-level clerk at the Bureau of Standard Classifications – scraped together the funds to visit Lviv. And whenever he did so, he would make sure to see his former student Pani Kvitka Nechipailo, whom he had attempted to teach English during...

Four principles characterize the life of the Ukrainian diaspora in the United States: Ukrainian patriotism, American loyalty, liberal democracy and religion. While all four can be reconciled, there are tensions among them that, if pushed to their limits, produce contradictions. They comprise six opposing pairs: if you arrange them as the points of a square,...

A current exhibit at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington is titled “Some Were Neighbors: Collaboration and Complicity in the Holocaust.” I would urge everyone who has the opportunity to see it. What is collaboration? In the context of the Holocaust, and from a moral standpoint, it can be seen as a form of...

“You wanna be monk?” That, at least, is how one of my high-school friends related the words of a brother he had met while visiting an Italian monastery with his parents one summer vacation. To us 1960s middle-class Baby Boomers, the idea was preposterously funny. Monks were comical little men in robes and sandals, with...

What do you do when you’re lost? Psychologists tell us that men and women react differently. Loathe to confess error or even admit to being lost, men typically forge ahead, hoping to eventually stumble upon the right path. Women retrace their steps to the wrong turn and set forth anew. While this seems more prudent,...

Are we headed for a new Dark Ages? For different reasons, and from different perspectives, many people think we are. But few have any idea of what to do about it. In the wake of the recent US presidential election, many – both liberals and conservatives, as well as the Left – fear the consequences...

“Ukrainian Catholics in America: A History,” by Bohdan P. Procko, edited by Ivan Kaszczak. Lanham, Md.: University Press of America, 2016, second revised edition. Xvi, 287 pages. $25. It is startling to consider that in the last decades of the 19th century and the first decades of the 20th, Greco-Catholics in the United States were...

Some words are a key to the spirit of our time. This is particularly true of trendy words. It was remarked long ago that “whatever” summarizes an attitude bereft of solid truths or principles, and that the ubiquitous “like” is emblematic of a culture of imitation, artificial and inauthentic. The widely used “random” suggests a...