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Editorials
November’s midterm elections are approaching, but over five million Americans, in nearly all 50 states, will be denied the right to cast ballots. Why? Because they are current or prior felony offenders who cannot exercise a right guaranteed them in the Constitution. Two million of them have co
Several journalists have recently weighed in on the status of women’s religious life in recent years: Ann Carey’s Sisters in Crisis: The Tragic Unraveling of Women’s Religious Life (1997); John Fialka’s Sisters: Catholic Nuns and the Making of America (2003); Cheryl L. Reed&r
I have met many LAY Christians who put professional religious to shame by their dedication, their service and their heartfelt love of God. I have encountered many lifestyles that seem much more based on Gospel values than formalized vows of poverty, chastity and obedience. Sometimes religious life f
Arts & CultureBooks
Charles D rsquo Ambrosio says that as a young man he turned to fiction in part as a Daedalian act of snobbery against aspects of his Jesuit education In an essay on J D Salinger published in 2001 D rsquo Ambrosio recounts how during his time at Seattle Prep reading Joyce and other modern write
Of Many Things
When traffic on the Midtown cross streets and East Side avenues of New York City is backed up day after day; when police and police barricades appear at intersections, in front of hotels and before public buildings; when lines of black sedans and S.U.V.’s fill entire city blocks and dour men a
News
Patriarch’s Hopes for Papal Visit to TurkeyEcumenical Orthodox Patriarch Bartholomew of Constantinople said he hopes Pope Benedict XVI’s November trip to Turkey will help calm recent tensions with Islam and advance his church’s struggle for religious rights. Patriarch Bartholomew,
A well-researched study of the negative dynamic that developed between the Catholic hierarchy and women religious in the United States in the decades following the Second Vatican Council has appeared as Double Crossed: Uncovering the Catholic Church’s Betrayal of American Nuns (Doubleday), by
In your writings on religion, you have given particular emphasis to questions of justice and peace. Do you believe these issues to be at the core of religious belief?Justice is an aspect of compassion that is one of the subjects I write about in The Great Transformation. Justice, if you like, is the
Arts & CultureBooks
If asked ldquo Who is Satan rdquo most of us might give an answer something like this Satan or the Devil is the fallen angel who persuaded Adam and Eve to commit the ldquo original sin rdquo Also known as the Antichrist and Lucifer he now presides over hell and entices people on earth to sin
Current Comment
As Others See UsInequities in the U.S. criminal justice system were among the subjects of concern that drew criticism from the United Nations Human Rights Committee last July in Geneva. Maximum security prisons came under fire for virtually 24-hour confinement of prisoners to their cells. Also of co
In the latest of my weekly telephone conversations with a colleague who lives in France, the first question she asked was, What do you think of the pope and Islam? Rarely inclined to talk politics, she was testing me out. And my response was testing her as well. Well, I think he could have said it d
News
In the Sept. 25 issue of America, Professor Marci A. Hamilton joined with Voice of the Faithful in renewing their call for “window” legislation. Window legislation retroactively suspends the statute of limitation for childhood sexual abuse damage claims so that lawsuits filed during a sp
Arts & CultureBooks
The North Atlantic captivity of the church is drawing to an end The center of Christian gravity is undeniably shifting southward This development is not a blip on the religious radar screen but a profound permutation Globally a major gravitational adjustment is occurring in the population density
Arts & CultureBooks
Alan Wolfe director of the Boisi Center for Religion and American Public Life at Boston College has written a sharp indictment of the Bush administration and the conservatives who support it Wolfe rsquo s overall interpretive point in Does American Democracy Still Work is that conservatives wh
Editorials
Those who take an apocalyptic view of the campaign against international terrorism like to cite the historian Samuel Huntington’s prediction of a "clash of civilizations." Commentators sympathetic to this view applauded Pope Benedict XVI’s address at the University of Regensbur
Much of the work to be done in the wake of the U.S. Catholic bishops’ new document on lay ecclesiastical ministry is on the practical and pastoral level. The National Association of Lay Ministry raised some tough questions about Co-Workers in the Vineyard of the Lord (November 2005) when they
Letters
Love of Learning
How happy I was to see your reference to Alma Miller, R.S.C.J., in the editorial, The People’s Schools (9/18). It was a privilege to be both her student and a dear friend, with whom I corresponded weekly throughout her life. Mother Miller demanded and expected the best from us. In addition to receiving a marvelous education, I was given a love of learning that I have never lost. Her enthusiasm for knowledge was contagious. After 50 years I am still taking courses, reading and writing. I know that would please her.
Phyllis Townley
Arts & CultureBooks
The gifts the poet discovers as she endures this dark night of the soul are many, and chief among these is her faith.
Arts & CultureBooks
Alice McDermott rsquo s new novel After This vividly often heart-rendingly portrays roughly 25 years up through 1977 in the lives of the Keane family John and Mary and their four children Jacob Michael Annie and Clare The novel rsquo s Irish-Catholic Long Island milieu will be familiar to