Greetings, dear Matters Twomey readers, and thanks for continuing to subscribe even as I’ve been AWOL for the past few months.

We hear the words “sanctuary city” so much that it barely registers that the first word goes back to churches — and, in particular, this one.

“Suspicion of foreigners goes back to the earliest days of the republic…Kraut traces how different ideologies would be considered intolerably dangerous according to the dominant fears of a given era. ...