America Magazine - Current Issue

Of Many Things

Two months ago I turned 51. That feels pretty old to me. But at least I’m a bit more experienced and, I hope, a little wiser than I was at 21. With that in mind, here are six stupid things I have done that I never want to do again. Maybe you’ve done some of them too. But I’ll bet we’d both be happier if we don’t ever again...

1. Compare. Ever heard the saying “Compare and despair”? Comparing yourself to someone else usually means that you imagine the other person is better off, more satisfied—in a word, happier.

But here’s the problem: We end up comparing what we know about our life, which is a mixed bag of goo

Current Comment

Waste Watchers

The Food Network lives on contests—young chefs competing with peers for $10,000 or facing celebrity pros for glory. It features fat chefs and bad cooks, to whom it offers improvement. It reworks failing restaurants and glorifies tasty grease. It is not where one looks for social commentary.

During the second week of January, though, the network aired a program titled “The Big Waste.” This show had the usual celebrities in a cook-off challenge, but here they had to cook a dinner for 100 guests using food that was destined to be thrown out. The men’s team (Bobby Flay and Michael Symon) hit the road, finding cabbages o

Taking Liberties

For a century and a half the Catholic Church in the United States has served the American people with health care, education and social services. Even a few months ago it would have seemed preposterous to suggest that the U.S. government would place the future of those good works at risk. That seems to be what has happened, however, with a decision by the Department of Health and Human Services to allow only a narrow conscientious exemption to the employer health care insurance mandate of the Affordable Care Act, the administration’s signature health care reform law.

For U.S. Catholics as citizens, the administration’s failure to offer a broader exemption presents a gr

Conversation Starters

Many Catholics over 50 are struggling with the realization that many younger Catholics, particularly seminarians and younger priests, do not share their sense of indebtedness to the Second Vatican Council. As one of those “over-50” Catholics, I am convinced that we overlook the influence of the council at our peril. The council’s enduring significance is not limited to the 16 documents it promulgated, however. There is much the church today can learn from a consideration of the actual conduct of the council.

Yves Congar, the great 20th-century Dominican ecclesiologist and a key theological consultant at Vatican II, believed that councils manifest a deepe

Vatican II at 50

Fifty years ago this last Christmas Day (Dec. 25, 1961), with the Apostolic Constitution “Humanae Salutis,” Blessed John XXIII formally convoked the Second Vatican Council in the hope that renewal of the church would give hope to the world. “I know how helpful for the good of souls are those means which tend to make the individual people in need of salvation more human,” he wrote. Accordingly, Pope John urged that the church had to “discern the signs of the times.” Despite the darkness of the era—it was the height of the cold war—he saw a few hints that “augur well for the fate of the Church and humanity.”

For many years

You Are Worthy

Many campus ministers and others who work with young adults ponder why 20-somethings often seem estranged from church and religious practices. Why does Charlie Sheen’s way of life appeal more to the average undergraduate male than Jesus? Why do the ways of the Kardashians touch the souls of some young women more than Dorothy Day or Mother Teresa? In a world where Snooki and the Situation rule, how can we get the millennial generation interested in God and the practices of faith?

In February 2010, the Pew Research Center reported that members of the millennial generation (born after 1982) are much less likely to participate in or be affiliated with any particular faith than w

The Art of Prayer

Some people, many of them Catholic, go to great lengths to learn about meditative and contemplative practices. For most of my life, I was not one of them. Rather, I came upon contemplation accidentally, almost despite myself.

As a first-year student at the College of the Holy Cross in Worcester, Mass., I registered for “Introduction to the History of Art,” a course taught by Professor Joanna E. Ziegler. No great aesthete, I selected the class to fulfill the arts requirement for graduation. And as a novice in art history, my expectations were colored by hand-me-down wisdom from my contemporaries. I anticipated a steady diet of names and dates, with which one might catal

Beyond Doubt

The only thing I do not like about my first name is its association with the verb to doubt. Thanks to the incredulity displayed by a certain apostle in chapter 20 of John’s Gospel, the phrase “doubting Thomas” can still be deployed as a winged taunt against anyone who shares my name.

Yet I sometimes persist in displaying doubt even when I should not. Sometimes it is self-doubt in which I indulge, but far more often I find myself unfairly doubting the abilities of others to get a job done. Here is an example. On the university campus where I work, a new building is going up just yards from my office. The occasional glance out my window has me second-guess

After the Call

In the early evening of Feb. 22, 1998, Larry and Marilyn Martone of Long Island, N.Y., received a phone call from Cook County Hospital telling them that their youngest child, Michelle, an undergraduate senior at the University of Chicago, had been hit by a car. She was on a ventilator and in critical condition with severe brain trauma. “Brain” and “ventilator” were the two words that Marilyn remembers as she, her husband and their sons headed out the door that night to fly to Chicago.

So begins the odyssey of the intrepid Martone family as they rescue Michelle from a health care system that just transfers her from one facility to another. At the heart of it

Great American Ripoff

You know the whine. Bloggers, pundits and media stories have repeated it often enough. Companies should not be faulted for America’s retirement-and-pension crisis. It was unforeseen economic factors—an aging workforce, increasing health care costs, an outmoded pension system and the stock market debacle—that necessitated slashing retiree benefits and forgoing pension plans for new employees.

Not so! says Ellen Schultz. Retirement Heist argues that today’s crisis, far from being a demographic accident, was manufactured by company executives and their facilitators—benefit consultants, insurance agencies, banks and industry lobbyists—to en

Sisters of the Word

In this slender volume Sandra M. Schneiders, I.H.M., offers a historical and theological reflection on the recent interaction between American women religious and the Vatican. But far more than this, she models a solid theological methodology by which history, biblical evidence and a concrete socio-historical situation can be brought together to illuminate the challenge of revelation and the meaning of history as the locus of the drama of salvation.

Schneiders’s work emerged in response to the Vatican’s investigation of many communities of American sisters launched in January 2009. In the book’s introduction, Schneiders carefully narrates the process by which she

Being a 'Yes Man'

Nobody likes getting stood up. Usually, with a self-devised set of criteria, we decide if the offender’s reason is legitimate or if we have a right to be mad. An emergency? Of course we understand. Duty? Sure. Still, part of our judgment calculus includes how avoidable we imagine it was, the person’s habits and history and so on. But who gets a pass for making a commitment and then not showing up because one simply changed one’s mind? Nobody.

This is what some Corinthians are saying about Paul. Among Paul’s many detractors were those in Corinth who leveled an additional charge against him: He’s a flake. Paul was traveling to Macedonia (northern Greece

Letters

Saving a Poor Man

I have just experienced the truth of your editorial “Failure to Protect” (1/30). This week I found a youngish Latvian man living in a field near Dublin airport. He hadn’t eaten in three days. I have never met someone so close to a mental breakdown; he couldn’t stop crying. Neither the airport police, who had thrown him off the property, nor the ordinary police, nor his own embassy people whom he had walked 10 miles to find, nor anyone else told him of the numerous Christian charities in town where he could at least eat. Without a blanket in January, this man could have died. Each group and the media would have blamed eve