It is widely assumed in Jesuit circles that when the Jesuit electors meet in Rome for their thirty-fifth general congregation they will issue a document treating globalization and environmental issues The major first focus of GC35 will be of course to elect a new superior general of the Jesuits

Recently economists pointed to a small drop in the number of absolutely poor in 2006 census data Many dispute the finding 8217 s significance The U S government 8217 s calculation of poverty 20 000 or under a year for a family of four is considered by many policy analysts as a grossly inade

I just got around to reading Jeffrey Sachs 2007 BBC Reith Lectures entitled Bursting at the Seams Many may have read if not do so Sachs stirring and important 2005 book The End of Poverty Economic Possibilities for Our Time Sachs an economist has been the principal adviser to the

In many ways the subtitle captures the expansive scope of this highly original intriguing and challenging book much better than the more pedestrian sounding the vocation of business John M daille a real-estate broker who also teaches at the University of Dallas deftly employs Catholic social t

This book is sure to garner much attention from professional sociologists of religion and probably historians of the Second Vatican Council as well In fact a blue-ribbon panel already responded and critiqued Melissa Wilde rsquo s volume at the annual meeting of the Association for the Sociology

Stephen Prothero a historian of American religion and the author of a much acclaimed earlier volume American Jesus takes his cue for his title from E D Hirsch rsquo s 1987 volume Cultural Literacy What Every American Needs to Know Prothero addresses a huge paradox America is very religious b

I cannot sufficiently praise and recommend American Mythos In its supple mining of data and its perspicacity about American culture and institutions it ranks with Robert Bellah rsquo s Habits of the Heart and Robert Putnam rsquo s Bowling Alone as ground-breaking interpretative social science I s

In a recent article in The Nation, the French philosopher Bernard-Henri Lévy, author of American Vertigo: Traveling America in the Footsteps of Tocqueville, expressed his shock at the moribund state of the American secular left. He found it strange, as an outsider, that so many progressives seem to

On Dec. 7 we commemorate the 40th anniversary of the promulgation of the “Declaration on Religious Liberty” (known also by the opening words of the Latin text, Dignitatis Humanae). No other decree of the Second Vatican Council was so controversial, underwent so many trials and setbacks (

Has the pluribus in the vaunted boast begun to submerge even eradicate the unum America has become Robert Wuthnow the director of Princeton University rsquo s Center for the Study of American Religion argues in this new book a more religiously diverse nation Buddhist and Hindu temples and Mo