Books on Jesus continue to sell In particuclar books on Jesus as a historical person have attracted a wide readership Much of the credit for this goes to the New Testament scholar Robert Funk who convened the Jesus Seminar as part of his admirable effort to make religion the fourth Ra matter of

David Lodge holds a special place among British novelists In certain ways he is heir to Evelyn Waugh as a Catholic writer with a mordant wit and concern for religion He is also an accomplished academic with half a dozen works of criticism to his credit No surprise then that the academy is a fr

If you think it must be hard to be homeless in a big city, imagine how much harder it is to be not only homeless, but also elderly and mentally ill. Yet 47 people in this painful situation have found a caring and permanent home at Fleming House in New York City’s Chelsea area. Most had previou

Do Not GeneralizeI wish to comment on the article Home Alone’ in the Priesthood (8/27) by Msgr. Eugene T. Gomulkanot to comment on Msgr. Gomulka’s theory about loneliness in the priesthood, but on what I fear could be an unfortunate generalization drawn from the article’s subheadin

Catholics Pray, Agencies Assist in Wake of Terrorist AttacksCatholic bishops and priests led prayers and church-run hospitals and agencies mobilized to assist the victims in the wake of the worst terrorist attack in U.S. history. Virtually every Catholic church in the United States scheduled a speci

My first encounter with homelessness came when I was 10 or 12. Passing a friend’s house in my hometown in Maryland late one summer afternoon, I was amazed to see two people sound asleep at the edge of the wooded lot next door: a man and a woman who evidently had no place to stay for the night.

Roads lie buried here

The more particular the focus goes one literary axiom the more universal its resonance Robert Frost rsquo s New England or William Faulkner rsquo s ldquo little postage stamp of Mississippi rdquo evoke worldwide response and admiration because the very palpability of their specific worlds will

The Jesuit John Dear once asked God for a sign Not only did he ask for a sign he gave God a timetable right now Heaven apparently was shaken The sign was granted immediately On the spot Dear was 21 at the time and only weeks away from entering the Society of Jesus Dear felt the best way to pr

The Declaration Dominus Iesus, issued in September 2000 by the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, aroused deep concern among many Jews and not a few Catholics. Let me first survey the specific areas of concern, then proceed to address the question of whether or not Jews can plausibly be sai

She was walking down the hospital corridor in stocking feet, a tall, striking woman with long hair and the head-covering of an observant Jew. We must have said a quick hello. It was a mutual recognition of an experience shared but not articulated: so you too are here because your kid has a brain tum

One of the more interesting and paradoxical characters in the debate over capital punishment is the person on the political right who attempts to combine the libertarian suspicion of the state with support for capital punishment Such a person like George W Bush or Ronald Reagan affirms that the

In an age when the Taliban invoke religion to justify demolishing statues of Buddha, it is heartening to learn of a Catholic jurist who used all of his powers of argument to prevent the burning of Jewish books. Better still to learn that the legal text through which he accomplished this feat is now,

The Key WordCongratulations to Francis A. Sullivan, S.J., for his article, “The Magisterium in the New Millennium” (8/27). Father Sullivan feels he has no “prophetic gifts” with which to foresee how the magisterium will be exercised in the future. I believe he is a prophet fo

French Bishop Convicted of Silence in Child Abuse CaseBishop Pierre Pican of the Diocese of Bayeux-Lisieux in Normandy, was convicted of keeping quiet about a priest who sexually abused children. He received a three-month suspended sentence. The priest, René Bissey, was sentenced to 18 years in pri

A friend recently asked me whether the Catholic Church, in its opposition to embryonic stem cell research, is committing a folly equal to its condemnation of Galileo. An apt question: the dawn of genetics is as revolutionary as the idea that the earth moved around the sun. Galileo’s tool was t

The international team of Panayiotis Zavos, of the University of Kentucky, and Servino Antinori of Rome, Italy, and a group called the Raelians, who think humans were made by aliens using genetic technologies, have both announced that they are moving forward on the human cloning project. The Raelian

I once heard a talk by a priest who was also a clinical psychologist, in which he said: “If you are a Christian, you have to believe that people can change. If you don’t believe people can change, you have no right to call yourself a believer in Jesus Christ and in his Gospel message. It

Faced with a growing pro-democracy movement led by intellectuals, journalists and the labor movement, King Mswati III of Swaziland (a small African country surrounded by South Africa and Mozambique) has cracked down on dissent and declared a state of emergency. Press censorship, arrest of dissidents