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

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

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

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

Down through the centuries, church bells have served a number of purposes: to warn the community of impending dangers, to mark celebratory occasions like weddings and sorrowful ones like death. With death by execution in mind, Dorothy Briggs, O.P., in Medford, Mass., has begun a national ecumenical

Immigration law has long been a specialty in which relatively few lawyers, members of Congress and even federal judges have true expertise. In 1996 Congress greatly increased the complexities of this body of law by enacting two statutes: the Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act (AEDPA), and

When President Lyndon Johnson declared a war on poverty in 1964, the homeless did not appear in the nation’s vocabulary, except perhaps as bums or hobos. The visibility of homeless people increased in the late 1960’s and early 1970’s, when nearly a half-million hospital beds were c

quot The world is on the verge of new and great changes Mr Scrooge You agree quot --Jacob Marley upon meeting Ebenezer Scrooge in George Minter rsquo s 1951 film A Christmas Carol The above epigraph alluding to the social economic cultural and political upheaval of the Industrial Revolutio

Healing HeartsThanks for another fine article from the pen of Julie A. Collins, Virginity Lost and Found (5/21). In a fresh way, she continues to weave the advice of Ignatius into contemporary words as educators re-examine how to hear the beat of a teenage broken heart.Kathleen G. WillsAnnapolis, Md

You’ve heard the news, no doubt. The American family is changing. No, not just changing—it is being revolutionized. New models are replacing the old. The traditional family, announced one of the great newsweeklies, is fading fast. Who needs a husband? asks another. On the op-ed page of T

At a recent conference on managed care, one of the speakers, a physician, complained that all too often we don’t call patients “patients” any more. These days patients are referred to as either customers, consumers, clients or covered lives. As is often the case at such physician m

Defending human rights pays off not only in terms of justice but also in ways that can include greater economic growth a more protected environment better public health and a generally less violent world Such is the basic theme of this important book Written by someone who knows the human right

Pope Visits UkrainePaying tribute to Ukrainians who endured decades of repression and assuring the nation’s Orthodox majority of his respect for their faith and fidelity, Pope John Paul II ended his long-awaited visit to Ukraine. Over the course of the visit on June 23-27, the pope drew larger

As a fellow theologian, Jon Nilson has my great respect. As a soothsayer and prophet of doom (America, 5/28) he has my respectful but well-considered disagreement. Catholic higher education is so vigorous as a result of wrestling with ill-matched, superimposed rules that it would take much more than