Under the influence of St. Thomas Aquinas, I hold that a soul is a unifying formative source of any living being’s activities and purpose. Thus each individual plant or tree has a soul, a formative cause of its integrated development in its life-activities of growth, healing and reproduction.
Look into any book about the history of racial integration in the United States, and you will almost certainly find dramatic stories about bus boycotts and Rosa Parks; Freedom Riders, voter registration and Emmett Till; Selma, Birmingham, Montgomery; and the civil rights movement and Martin Luther K
"What kind of judgment is one based on scraps of paper copied three times? We do not want such judgments.” So said Cardinal Josef Glemp to the crowd that filled Warsaw Cathedral after Archbishop Stanislaw Wielgus announced his resignation on Jan. 6, moments before the celebration of his instal
Not so long ago, chastity, the virtue that single people practice by abstaining from sex and married people by being faithful to their spouses, was regarded as a mainstream value. Even people who failed to live up to it generally recognized it as normal and normative. Today, however, the mainstream
One need not be one of those bloated bloviators of talk radio to rush to the judgment that political correctness and ethnic sensitivity can be carried to comic, even tragic, extremes at times. Philip Roth, an author of solid liberal credentials, explored the dark side of planet P.C. in his splendid
The contemporary poet Franz Wright expresses a sense of human life as a brief hiatus between an immense before and after. The cold and dark was Wright’s environment for decades of his life, starting from age eight, when divorce took his much-admired father, the poet James Wright, out of the ho
Too bad you limited to one page your report on the Vatican’s notification on the works of your fellow Jesuit, Jon Sobrino (Signs of the Times, 3/26). My diocesan newspaper, not in your league by any means, nevertheless gave us a more complete report, which allowed