How did it happen that Christianity—which prided itself on its expansive love, extended even to enemies—should itself resort to violence? “More Christians,” writes Paula Fredriksen in a recent review (The New Republic, 6/18) of H. A. Drake’s Constantine and the Bishops:

Cardinal Danneels, did you plan this intervention at the May consistory beforehand? No. At synods, I usually wait about a week before I speak. First I listen. I feel the temperature. I listen to what has been said, what has not been said, and what I think needs to be said at that point. Some bi

With the sequencing of the human genome virtually completed and the first analysis of the decoded sequence now reported this book is important for at least two reasons First it explores the promises and challenges of the new genetics with comprehensive yet exceptionally readable commentary Secon

I was standing in the doorway, looking at the clear blue sky on an icy cold January afternoon, when she came up the stairs. I hadn’t seen Irene in over six years, but I had been thinking about her a lot recently. She was coming up from a diocesan meeting my parish was hosting in the church hal

Maybe the devil made me do it, but after reading Bishop (now Cardinal) Walter Kasper's essay "On the Church" (reprinted in America, 4/23) for the second or third time, I went back through the text and conducted a little test.

Human Saints and AngelsThe art portfolio by Michael O’Neill McGrath, O.S.F.S., “The Saints and Me” (7/2), is a delight. McGrath brings out through his art one of the best aspects of Catholicism, our fellowship with the saints and their very humanness. We see Peter eating fish, Doro

The New York Times has as much enthusiasm for President Bush as Mr. Creakle, the headmaster of Salem House, had for that wholly unpromising schoolboy, David Copperfield. The Times’s editorials regularly register their disfavor with Mr. Bush’s domestic and foreign policies. What about the

The word survivor suggests someone who has emerged alive from a plane crash or a natural disaster. But the word can also refer to the loved ones of murder victims, and this was the sense in which it was used at a four-day conference in early June at Boston College. Sponsored jointly by the college a

With this well-written and insightful new book Robert Wuthnow a professor of sociology at Princeton University continues his exploration of the changing nature of contemporary American culture and religion already begun with Growing Up Religious After Heaven and Loose Connections The premise of

Archbishop Weakland Says He’s Not Disobeying PopeArchbishop Rembert G. Weakland of Milwaukee declared, in a message read in all parishes on July 15, that he is not disobeying the pope by going ahead with the renovation of the Cathedral of St. John the Evangelist. The archbishop expanded on tha

When I began to think about psychiatry as a medical specialty in 1963, I was vaguely aware of a tension between the church and psychiatry. Bishop Fulton J. Sheen suggested on his weekly television show that Catholics would not need a psychiatrist if they made a good confession. G. K. Chesterton had

The issues confronting the church in our time are many. I have chosen three of them, well aware that this choice is doubtless both biased and incomplete. And I am also certainly under the influence of the situation in northern Europe, where the churches are exposed to the eroding influence of secula

Toward the end of a summer vacation in 1993 at her Connecticut home Antoinette Bosco received the kind of telephone call that mdash to use her own words mdash quot leaves a family with lives permanently shattered quot The call came from a sheriff in Montana who informed her that her son and dau

The working document for next October’s international synod of bishops is now being circulated. The text, titled The Bishop: Servant of the Gospel of Jesus Christ for the Hope of the World, runs to 120 pages and has 229 footnotes. Significantly, the pope’s groundbreaking encyclical on Ch

In 1985 James Froemsdorf, a Missouri state trooper, a husband and the father of three young daughters, was shot three times and killed by a wanted felon who had been stopped for speeding. Although the criminal was handcuffed, he was able to free one of his hands, grab the officer’s gun and kil

A. I. Artificial Intelligence leaves no doubt that it wants its audiences to enter a realm of pure fantasy when it identifies one of the last remaining islands of civilization as New Jersey. As the voice-over narrator (Ben Kingsley) explains (pace George W.), global warming has melted the polar ice