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FaithThe Word
"Back to basics!” is a familiar slogan in many walks of life, including religion. The basics of Christianity include the creeds, moral precepts and sacraments. But where do these basics come from?
Of Many Things
As we moved into the Easter season this year, I found myself thinking of a comment by the sacramental theologian Peter Fink, S.J., about how difficult it can be to get Catholics to pay attention to the Easter season. After 40 days of Lent and the Easter Triduum, people’s focus and imagination
Editorials
For Christians throughout the world the dawn of Easter morning marks the celebration of the triumph of life over death, as we affirm our faith in the resurrection of Jesus. Religious faith is easily caricatured these days, dismissed as a failure of nerve before the ambiguities of real life or, more
More than 15 years ago I received a telephone call from a young rabbinic colleague who clearly found herself in a situation of great discomfiture. At the time, I held a position for the Reform Jewish movement not unlike the position I hold today at the Anti-Defamation League, directing interfaith re
Letters
Watchful Eye
In reading Will the Seminaries Measure Up? by Ronald D. Witherup, S.S., (3/20) the jump-off-the-page statement that there is only one question in the Instrumentum Laboris about homosexuality seems as if that should cover the sexuality issues in the church. What disturbs me is that the question should be, Is there evidence of any inappropriate sexual activity in the seminary? To me the implication of the first question is that sexual activity between a man and a woman is O.K. because it is evidence that the seminarian is not homosexual. Isn’t celibacy the issue here? Why does the church have to go around an issue before facing it? We the people of God have to continue to keep a watchful eye on the leaders of our church, who are not all honorable men.
Christine Ring
Arts & CultureBooks
Some people would characterize the past five years of the Bush administration as inconceivably distasteful and disastrous For others the administration rsquo s policies are long awaited perfectly logical and admired Why such a discrepancy In American Theocracy which reads like a cross between a
The Word
The seven weeks between Easter Sunday and Pentecost constitute the Easter season While less well known than Advent or Lent the Easter season is important because we live in the light of Jesus rsquo resurrection at Easter and are challenged repeatedly to reflect on the difference that the Easter e
Of Many Things
Spring can be an elusive season. In New England, many residents I know claim it doesn’t exist. All they know is “mud-time,” a dreary interlude between the long winter and a brief summer. The survey crews of my brother’s engineering firm groan with the very thought of slogging
Ethics is about what we do. We form our moral judgments, our consciences; and we act on them or we refuse to. We change ourselves and our little parts of the world by our agency. We respond to duties or a desire to maximize happiness or a commitment to justice. Supposedly autonomous agents, we make
Scientists became excited not long ago when new observations suggested that the expansion of the universe is accelerating. It had been thought that expansion should be slowing. The new findings give additional support to the theory of the physicist Alan Guth that the universe immediately after its b
News
Jerusalem Church Leaders on Israeli ElectionsThe Patriarchs and church leaders of Jerusalem have issued the following statement, dated March 29, written after the elections in Israel. It read in part:The Israeli citizens voted yesterday for a new Knesset, from whose members a government is expected
Current Comment
Reality CheckIn recent weeks, plans for school and parish reconfigurations have been disclosed in a number of dioceses. It is reality-check time across much of the Northeast, where changing demographics have occasioned these realignments. However poignant and evocative the stories of my grandmother
"Señor, me has mirado a los ojos; sonriendo, has dicho mi nombre. (Lord, you have looked into my eyes; smiling, you have called my name.) So goes the refrain of one of the best known Latin American hymns, which poignantly expresses the core Christian belief: God loved us first. When you looked
Faith in Focus
"Let him easter in us," wrote Gerard Manley Hopkins in his poem The Wreck of the Deutschland. In this case easter is a nautical term. It means steering a craft toward the east, into the light. Throughout the 40 days of Lent we have been heading toward the light, trying to shake the darknes
Culture
Writing a novel based on the Gospels is a tricky business, not only because the Gospels themselves are such special documents, but because the two literary forms have very different purposes. Both are narratives, of course, but the novel is, historically speaking, a relatively recent phenomenon and
Arts & CultureBooks
There is a master of American letters working in our midst today of whom not many readers are aware For more than 23 years the novelist Stephen Wright has written uncompromisingly and astutely about America in meticulously crafted prose and witty realistic dialogue that reflects the spiritual wan
The Word
The two most important days on the church rsquo s calendar are Good Friday and Easter Sunday This is so because Jesus rsquo death and resurrection are at the core of Christian faith The early Christian confessions of faith embedded in the New Testament place these events front and center In fact
Editorials
The United States has enjoyed an extraordinarily long period of economic growth with very little inflation. There have been setbacks caused by high oil prices, the attacks on 9/11 and the dot-com crash, but in general there have not been the wide swings from high inflation to deep recession that wer