Concerns about a potential humanitarian emergency were mounting in late July as people of Haitian descent began to be forced out of the Dominican Republic and into tent cities along the border with Haiti. • A decision by the Boy Scouts of America on July 27 to allow gay troop leaders and employ

What do a cow, a human being and the ozone layer have in common?

To what extent is the autistic person in possession of an autonomous self?

Race, assimilation and 19th-century Catholic immigrants

A book came my way a few months ago, a literally weighty tome of almost seven pounds, quarto sized, two and a half inches thick. The book is The Codex Canadensis and the Writings of Louis Nicolas, a beautiful, scholarly work with 555 numbered pages of text and illustrations. I found it through a Goo

The reality of building community

Our painful attempts to live a fulfilling sexual existence could be helped by a consideration of the world of agriculture. This idea is hardly novel, and it owes much to that fine essay by Wendell Berry, “The Body and the Earth,” but I think we have yet to tease out the essential connect

On my desk at America Media headquarters sits a sealed glass bowl containing some dark, hardened soil from the tract of land my family tilled for more than two centuries in County Galway, Ireland. This is unsurprising, I suppose. When I try to count back through my 13 predecessors as editor in chief

American leaders regard belligerence rather than persuasion as the key to peace.

Editor’s Note: This week’s Reply All section is dedicated to the many thoughtful responses to “After Obergefell" (Editorial, 7/20).Humility and Truth-TellingI found much prudential and sensible pastoral exhortation in America’s editorial on the Supreme Court decision reg

Immigration advocates hailed a court ruling on July 24 that could mean the end of an Immigration and Customs Enforcement policy to lock up families in compounds run by for-profit prison companies while they pursue asylum and other types of protection from deportation.Judge Dolly Gee of the Central C

Pope Francis is convinced that the Holy Spirit is active in popular movements.

Deal-Breakers in Congress; Killer Robots; Climate Talk in 2016

A reliquary discovered in the grave of Gabriel Archer, a founding member of Jamestown has raised the possibility that there were crypto-Catholics among these early settlers. David Collins, S.J., associate professor and director of doctoral studies in the history department at Georgetown University w

If you attend Mass in Chicago, you might encounter a blind lector reading the day’s Scripture from a Braille lectionary while accompanied at the altar by a guide dog. You might receive communion from a eucharistic minister seated in a wheelchair. Through the SPRED (Special Religious Education)

St. Augustine was a comic genius. Is there a funnier one-liner in all of theology than his prayer in the Confessions, “Lord, give me chastity, but not yet”?

A Ukrainian bishop said a Russian-backed separatist rebellion has plunged his country into its worst humanitarian crisis since World War II. He warned that “millions of refugees” could soon head for Europe to escape starvation.“Huge numbers are now caught between hammer and anvil;

“Where is my home?” I assured her that her home was with us, right here, forever. Two years later, we stood before a judge in a wood-paneled courtroom and she officially became our daughter.

We don’t need people to believe that Planned Parenthood is evil; In fact, it would be helpful to recognize the value of the general health services that Planned Parenthood offers. But we need people to believe that something more life-giving than what Planned Parenthood is doing is both necessary and possible.

For 80 years, the pope who was born Giovanni Battista Montini, simply trusted in God and placed his hope in Him and because of that, he hoped “for good things,” like “lasting joy and mercy.”