For several days I had noticed colorful floats lined up in Zahal Square near City Hall in Jerusalem. Large painted plastic figures of men and women dressed as kibbutzim with tools and tractors were surrounded by fruits, vegetables, trees, flowers, grasses, greenery and barley sheavesall in readiness

Born in Berlin in 1923 to affluent Jewish parents Gregory Baum was sent for safety to England as a young teenager With the outbreak of war the refugee became an enemy alien and was interned in Canada Befriended there by a Catholic family he discovered Augustine rsquo s Confessions Like Edith S

This is a provocative even polemical book The provocation flows from the near-taboo question it raises a question that merits a serious hearing How much time do children need with parents especially mothers Do we need to scrutinize closely America rsquo s ongoing massive historically unprece

Critics have been talking for years of the need to reform the United Nations. In this country the pressure has frequently come from conservative politicians like the late Senator Jesse Helms, who are jealously protective of U.S. sovereignty and begrudging of funding for the international organizatio

On Nov. 30, 2004, an extraordinary liturgical event took place in St. George’s Church in Istanbul, the cathedral of the Ecumenical Patriarchate of Constantinople. As Patriarch Bartholomew presided nearby, glass cases containing the remains of two of his predecessors were placed on the patriarc

Not long ago surely in a fit of masochism I dusted off The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire What with the current administration rsquo s tactful outsourcing of war to the brave but dominantly underclass warrior lack of interest for anything that smacks of environmental concern and the conspi

Cardinal, Not Pope, Will Preside at Beatification of Marianne CopeMother Marianne Cope of Molokai, Hawaii, will be beatified in mid-May, but Pope Benedict XVI will not celebrate the beatification Mass. For years, Vatican officials and theologians have been discussing the possibility of returning to

A plenary council or regional synod may not have been good ideas anyway. But more and more, the attitude appears to be that the church’s business is the bishops’ business and no one else’s; openness and a desire to involve others in church affairs seem to have become passé. It is worth considering why.

The thesis of this book is that like Nazareth this town hidden in the Cajun country of south central Louisiana has been the home of holy people whom an oblivious world ought to know about And it rsquo s true Grand Coteau La makes Nazareth in Galilee look like the Great White Way Can anything

I am sitting at my desk near the library’s back door when I notice a hat on the floor. Evidently one of the many theology students rushing to class dropped it. I notice that it is a fine hat, made of wool and clearly hand-knit, so I trust its owner will return shortly. If not, I remind myself,

Most people drink in order to enjoy wine. Miles Raymond (Paul Giamatti) enjoys wine in order to drink. Surely there are as many definitions of alcoholism as there are drinkers, or even as there are people who have ever thought about it, but Miles has enough classic symptoms to give friends reason to

This volume presumes an older one of Selected Poems which was published by New Directions in 1959 and again in 1967 in an enlarged edition with an introduction by Mark Van Doren Van Doren had been Thomas Merton rsquo s university professor and mentor at Columbia It was he who put Merton rsquo s

The editors on Joseph Ratzinger's election as pope

From 2005, John W. O'Malley, S.J., on the resurgence in Jesuit scholarship

The Catholic fiction writer from Georgia Flannery O rsquo Connor 1925-64 once volunteered that it would be 50 years before readers understood her stories Half a century after the publication of her first novel Wise Blood 1952 and the inaugural collection of her short stories A Good Man Is