Among the signal achievements of the Second Vatican Council is the Roman Catholic Church rsquo s irreversible commitment to the cause of Christian unity How did the church come to change its preconciliar triumphalist insistence on the ldquo return rdquo of ldquo schismatics and heretics rdquo

I owe a great deal to Henri J M Nouwen His writing which I first discovered in the 1970 rsquo s helped clarify the spiritual life for me I continue to read and profit from his books and recommend them to others Oddly I felt a certain trepidation about this posthumous work on spiritual direct

In his new book Before the Next Attack Yale law professor Bruce Ackerman takes a complex constitutional proposal directly to the American public and he does a terrific job explaining the what and why of his proposals as well as the history of emergency power in the United States I am sure my le

Years ago my husband and I spent a grim rainy day at the former Dachau Concentration Camp in southern Germany The museum rsquo s last exhibit in white letters against a black background was a single line from American philosopher George Santayana Those who forget the past are condemned to repea

In his poem God rsquo s Grandeur Gerard Manley Hopkins calls it the dearest freshness deep down things and in his Book of Pilgrimage Rainer Maria Rilke refers to it as the deep innerness of all things What each poet strives to capture in words is the heart of matter beyond appearance that essen

This volume exquisitely edited by Kenneth Himes O F M is a superb contribution to Catholic social ethics and will undoubtedly serve as a basic text providing a synthetic statement of the last century of the Catholic social tradition While its primary audience is the Catholic community it prov