In 2001, Col. Pat Lang, a Knight of the Holy Sepulcher, a leading Middle East intelligence analyst and now a well-known television commentator, called together a small group to develop a program for the Knights to support grass-roots peacemaking between Israelis and Palestinians. Among the participa

I received a thoughtful e-mail message recently from a late 1980’s graduate of a Jesuit university. He is strongly pro-life, armed with 27 hours of philosophy and theology requirements to boot, and is at loggerheads with some pro-choice friends who hold the position that there is a distinction

To qualify as a Hollywood blockbuster, historical epics have to have several things: an anachronistically modern hero, a ruthless villain, a contrived love story, cataclysmic battle scenes and, of course, beheadings. But historical epics also have to have something else: a Big Idea, typically an idi

In the final week of July 2005, a month darkened by terrorist violence in London, the Irish Republican Army officially declared an end to its armed campaign to eliminate British rule in Northern Ireland. The time had come, the I.R.A. statement said, to pursue a political and democratic path to a uni

Being the only superpower means never having to say you’re sorry. In the year since the first photos of humiliation and torture at Abu Ghraib prison were leaked, there has been a flurry of Pentagon studies, jump-started criminal investigations and disturbing new revelations in the media. Yet p

In August 1917 Pope Benedict XV proposed terms of peace to the nations engaged in the First World War. Though so close in content and formulation to Woodrow Wilson’s Fourteen Points of January 1918 that Benedict’s most recent biographer, John F. Pollard, charges the Calvinist and notorio

Eudora Welty closed her best-selling autobiography One Writer rsquo s Beginnings with the words As you have seen I am a writer who came of a sheltered life A sheltered life can be a daring one as well For all serious daring comes from within Originally opposed to the idea of a biography towar

A handful of the provisions of the USA Patriot Act are set to expireor sunset on Dec. 31, and Congress is therefore considering which of them to re-authorize. President Bush wants the entire act to be made permanent, contending that it has made the United States safer in the wake of the terrorist at

Roger Haight needs little introduction to readers of America A Jesuit for over 50 years past president of the Catholic Theological Society of America and the author of several prize-winning books of theology he now teaches at the interdenominational Union Theological Seminary in New York City I

Balthasar believed our contemplation of God must take its cue from Christ, who entered into solidarity with human suffering.

They don’t make movies the way they used to, and Cinderella Man shows why. Before it opened, Universal thought it had a certain hit on its hands. The film features two of the most bankable names on any marquee in the world: Russell Crowe and Renée Zellweger. Its director, Ron Howard, had team

Roberts Nominated to Supreme CourtJudge John G. Roberts, 50, was nominated to the U.S. Supreme Court on July 19 by President George W. Bush, who called him a man of extraordinary accomplishment and ability who has a good heart. Roberts has been a judge of the federal appeals court for the District o

Something happened to the mind of England between the time of Donne and the time of Tennyson and Browning wrote T S Eliot in his 1921 essay The Metaphysical Poets This something was the dissociation of sensibility from which we have never recovered He meant the separation of thought and fe

Balthasar seemed to know just what I was feeling: Christians, he said, often feel like a foreigner forced to speak in a language whose rules they have never learned, or a stuttering child who wants to say something but cannot.

I lingered for hours beneath the gray sideshow canvas,

Tompkins Square Park stands out as one of the larger parks of lower Manhattan: 10 whole acres—remarkable in a city cramped for space. On weekend afternoons, I sometimes walk over to admire the beauty of the park’s trees and marvel at the diversity of the people who gather there, well-off