For most of us, the legal system seems something far away. We know of lawyers and lawsuits, crime and punishment. The law keeps things going smoothly, maintains order and apparently insures that justice is served. At least apparently. I’ve had the usual contact: parking tickets, traffic violat

Members of the United States Congress never are in a position to support the legalization of abortion, because in 1973 the U.S. Supreme Court legalized it by raw judicial power. The Supreme Court’s imposition does not, however, require those measures conducive to abortion that many members of

This book takes its title from an observation made by Thomas Jefferson in 1816 ldquo Old Europe will have to lean on our shoulders and to hobble along by our side under the monkish trammels of priests and kings as she can What a colossus shall we be rdquo Niall Ferguson professor of financia

The American story has been the “story of flawed and fallible people united across the generations by grand and enduring ideals,” said President George W. Bush in his inaugural address of Jan. 20, 2001. The theme of a united people also ran through the keynote speech of Illinois senatori

The elegant Beaux-arts lobby, with its high ceiling and oak paneled walls, held only a few people early that morning: three 60-ish men seated before the big windows overlooking East 28th Street in Lower Manhattan. It might have been a fashionable club. But the men were not elegantly dressed, and the

The days were lengthening. Daylight itself seemed brighter. The sap was rising in the trees, and with it I felt the wanderlust rising in me.

The insufferable anonymous narrator of Notes From Underground 1864 is the first great example of Dostoyevsky rsquo s genius for creating paradoxical witnesses to Christianitytwisted truth-telling unbelievers like Svidrigaylov in Crime and Punishment Ippolit in The Idiot Shatov in The Possessed

In this richly documented and thoroughly engaging memoir Joseph A Califano Jr recalls his years in Washington as a member of several administrations and as a partner in a powerful law firm From this vantage point Califano observed and participated in the national crises and unsettling cultural c

I have poor circulation, and that makes my ankles swell,” said the woman in front of me, speaking in the soft accents of “the islands.” A heavy-set person in her 50’s, she explained this as we sat on our bags early one morning at the Port Authority bus terminal in New York Ci

As I get older, I continue to discover that many of the beliefs I cherished as a child were not really truths. They were, rather, proverbs my Irish mother used to say to encourage her daughters to behave appropriately. Because of a letter I received during the past Easter season, I was reminded of t

When we think about politics and the parish, we generally think about policy advocacy - for example, the pre-election-year statements of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, like Faithful Citizenship: A Catholic Call to Political Responsibility(October 2003), or letter-writing campaigns conducte

One might approach this book as a field guide to the multiple species of church or early Christian assembly to be found in the New Testament The text remains rooted in the world of first-century Christianity The Rev Raymond Collins professor of New Testament at The Catholic University of America

The disaster unfolding in the Darfur region of Sudan shines a spotlight once again on the plight of refugees and internally displaced persons. The Sudanese government has stood by as Arab Janjaweed militias engaged in the systematic destruction of Darfurian villages and water sources. Thirty thousan

I was raised a Catholic. I know in my bones that I would not hold the views I hold today if it were not for the values I learned in Catholic school. I am, I think it is fair to say, a Midwestern, populist progressive in the tradition of Robert LaFollette, George Norris and Theodore Roosevelt. Their

We like to think we would have been

With these two books of translated sonnets one under its own label and one through a subsidiary Farrar Straus and Giroux tightens its claim to a place on the top rung of literary publishers The sonnet is about as much in vogue these days as the gavotte but we have to admire the great practition

‘Even before dawn, there is a Mass being celebrated, and pilgrims are already here, kneeling before the space, running their hands over the rock, praying the Rosary and hoping for healing, as they have been doing since 1858.’