The United Nations has reported that the number of chronically hungry people worldwide is increasing at the rate of five million annually. But even here in the United States, richest of all nations, hunger and food insecurity (limited access to nutritionally adequate foods) have been steadily rising

"In this world nothing is certain but death and taxes," Benjamin Franklin observed in 1789. On no day does this seem more true for most Americans than on April 15, the day they take part in the annual ritual of filing a tax return. Knowing that April is a time when taxes are much on the mi

The front cover of 'Living to Tell the Tale' shows the author as a wide-eyed child of 2, while the back cover shows the Nobel laureate as a distinguished gentleman of 75.

Taxes and tax collectors have been around in one form or another for most of human history. Tax collectors appear in many of the Gospel stories, and the Evangelist Matthew was himself a tax man. Many American Catholics may not realize it, but their bishops are often tax collectors too, regularly lev

Keeler Prays With Victims at Day of AtonementIn a day designed to bring healing and promote understanding, Cardinal William H. Keeler of Baltimore prayed with the victims of clerical sexual abuse during a day of atonement on March 7, asking the survivors to forgive the church for the sins it had com

Despite all the talk about a vocation shortage, there is in fact no such thing in the Catholic Church. The real shortage is that of vocational discernment, and that is a very different problem. The shortfall in the number of candidates for the priesthood, the consecrated life and other forms of Chri

The confluence of advances in human genetics and reproductive science has resulted in the ability to design babies ldquo Designing babies rdquo is an imprecise term used by journalists and commentators mdash not by scientists mdash to describe several different reproductive technologies that have

The ministry of the reader at Mass is pivotal to the whole liturgical celebration.

John Jay Report Undergoing RevisionsErrors in the report prepared by the John Jay College of Criminal Justice on sexual abuse by Catholic clergy leave unanswered one of the central questions the report was supposed to answer: How did church leaders respond to allegations of sexual abuse? The report

As predicted, the release on Feb. 27 of the report prepared by the John Jay College of Criminal Justice on sexual abuse by members of the Catholic clergy created another sizable aftershock in the crisis that has shaken the Catholic Church.

By now, even casual readers of newspapers and viewers of television know that in June 2002 the bishops of the United States, meeting in Dallas, Tex., set up a board of distinguished lay Catholic men and women to review the crisis created by the sexual abuse of minors by priests. On Feb. 27, 2004, th

Although Gene Outka rsquo s The Ethics of Human Stem Cell Research first appeared in the Kennedy Institute of Ethics Journal it serves as the centerpiece for the valuable collection God and the Embryo While size alone might indicate its strategic place it is at least two-thirds longer than the ot

Sister Helen Prejean once again last fall spent several days with us at America House. She was in New York in November to consult with the actor-playwright Tim Robbins about the stage version of her book Dead Man Walking. She found time to stop by my office to speak about this latest reincarnation o

I admit with embarrassment that I found myself, on a recent evening of very low energy, staring at the concluding segment of a television show called “Extreme Makeover.” The three women featured—note that they were all women—had been shown earlier looking the way most of us l

Almost 37 years have passed since Pope Paul VI set in motion the restoration of the permanent diaconate with his apostolic letter of June 18, 1967, Sacram Diaconatus Ordinem. One year after the promulgation of that letter, the bishops of the United States began restoring the permanent diaconate in t

Sailing the Wine-Dark Sea is Thomas Cahill rsquo s fourth volume in the Hinges of History series which includes his How the Irish Saved Civilization The Gifts of the Jews and Desire of the Everlasting Hills In these books Cahill interprets the achievements of the ancient civilizations that are f

Ninety years ago, a woman named Caroline Pratt started a school for a few children from Italian and Irish working-class families in the Greenwich Village section of Lower Manhattan. She took this step because she thought the neighborhood public schools were humdrum and ineffective. Her experiment wa

Feb. 27, 2004, was a bad day for the bishops of the United States. They received little credit from the media or victims’ groups for the study conducted by the John Jay College of Criminal Justice on the prevalence and incidence of sexual abuse of children by members of the Catholic clergy dur