George W Bush gave his farewell address to the nation last night and displayed in full force what is his least endearing quality his Manichaean view of the world The Manichaens wrestled with the fact of evil in the world and posited belief in two Gods one the Lord of Light and the other the Lord

The USCCB has posted apparently without fanfare the Vatican s final report from the Apostolic Visitation of seminaries and houses of formation for religious orders from 2006 nbsp The visitation received widespread interest coming as it did after the sexual abuse crisis and in response to V

This Sunday s Gospel is a selection from the Gospel of John specifically a passage that tells of two of John s disciples becoming disciples of Jesus To preach on this text can be made relatively simple certainly to change one s religious dedication and devotion in the light of new understa

Fr Manuel Musallam the Parish Priest of Gaza has told Caritas Jerusalem There are dead bodies lying on the streets The clinics are carrying out operations on the floor and women have no place to give birth There is extreme fear everywhere here The phosphorous gas being thrown in by Gaza is c

President George W Bush thinks history will be kinder in its assessment of his foreign policy than current popular opinion It is difficult to see how Bush rsquo s reputation is tied up entirely with the Iraq War It is a commonplace to say that the world is well rid of Saddam Hussein and who can

The eminent sociologist Robert Bellah the lead author of the landmark book Habits of the Heart has a fascinating essay on nbsp Barack Obama nbsp the website The Immanent Frame nbsp And these reflections on the president-elect and the nbsp common good a nbsp popular phrase in Catholic nbsp so

Cambridge MA Each year in January I head out to Los Angeles mdash or more precisely Culver City within LA mdash to be with the Jesuit novices of the West Coast for a few days of conversation on interreligious dialogue I wrote about this last year in this space so need not describe again t

President Bush rsquo s press conference the day was galling in many ways The man rsquo s inability to admit a mistake was stunning Hell I rsquo ve made plenty of mistakes in the past eight years How about you But nothing was more pathetic than his truculence regarding the federal response to th

If Treasury Secretary-designate Tim Geithner can rsquo t get his own taxes right why should we trust him with ours It is a fair question but one that I suspect has a simple answer My guess is that Mr Geithner actually does not do his own taxes but instead hires someone to do them But that rais

Imagine my surprise when I nbsp received nbsp an nbsp email this morning that read in its entirety ldquo Jesus added you as a friend on Facebook nbsp We need to confirm that you know Jesus in order for you to be friends on Facebook rdquo nbsp I rsquo m not joking nbsp Here s the link to

Disproportion in warfare is sometimes a simple matter of commonsense As Justice Potter Stewart wrote of hardcore pornography ldquo I know it when I see it rdquo We don rsquo t need philosophers and moral theologians to define it for us When we heard in Vietnam that ldquo We destroyed the vill

What rsquo s good for the goose is good for the gays Anyone who supported the selection of controversial evangelical pastor Rick Warren to give the prayer at the Inaugural ceremony must now support the selection of controversial Episcopalian bishop Gene Robinson to give the opening prayer at the Li

As well as being the 400th anniversary of Galileo s glimpse of Jupiter s moons 2009 is the bicentenary of Charles Darwin s birth -- and the 150th anniversary of his epoch-changing work On the Origin of the Species Should it occur to anyone Dawkins put down that finch to dress the ninete

The Holocaust was an evil of enormous proportions In the West at least it has become an iconic horror and in the face of similar atrocities much intellectual labor has been expended to sustain its unique standing in the popular imagination as the evil par excellence Comparisons and analogies a

nbsp and why atheism is a comfortable indulgence Madeleine Bunting nbsp gets it

George W Bush leaves office with some of the lowest approval numbers since the advent of modern polling Of course the first president to achieve historic lows when polling first began Harry S Truman has been treated far more kindly by history Will the same happen to George W Bush For the ne

From AP VATICAN CITY by Nicole Winfield ndash Cardinal Pio Laghi a longtime nbsp Vatican nbsp diplomat who went to Washington to try to dissuade nbsp U S President George W Bush nbsp from launching the2003 invasion of Iraq has died the Vatican said Sunday He was 86 Laghi died Saturday e

The fun goes on The UK advertising nbsp ombudsman nbsp may have to rule on God s existence following a complaint by Christians that a bus poster paid for by atheists violates industry standards In All Things regulars may recall the poster and the British Atheist Bus Campaign controversy which

And why not nbsp James Martin SJ

Governance is a moral act Since the Reagan years the morals enshrined in our nation rsquo s policies have been those values that characterize laissez-faire economics individual responsibility acquisitiveness personal freedom and less government intrusion in corporate decision-making processes