Oral TraditionWhile I have great appreciation for the article by Robert P. Waznak, S.S., “Preaching Faith in the Midst of Tragedy” (10/8), and recommended it enthusiastically to a class, I must demur from his comments (Letters, 10/29) on The Word for Oct. 8. Till proven otherwise I am wi

It was 1998 the Welfare Reform Bill had just passed and the writer Barbara Ehrenreich wanted to know how the four million women about to be booted into the labor market were going to make it on 6 or 7 an hour When the question came up over lunch with Harper rsquo s editor Lewis Lapham she sugge

Amnesty International’s wide-ranging report, Torture Worldwide, was issued last fall, but it remains sadly current as new accounts of torture continue to come to light through Amnesty and other organizations, like Human Rights Watch. In May, for example, the latter documented the torture of et

Flags are ubiquitous, and patriotism is in full flower. It puts me in mind of Operation Desert Storm, when the country was awash in flags, yellow ribbons and tough talk. I felt disconnected and isolated from the mass of my fellow citizens, a disgusted and impotent voice of dissent. Then I met Dan La

The Sri Lakshmi Temple is a popular center for the worship of the goddess Lakshmi known for her graciousness and generosity Tamil-speaking Hindu priests perform the daily and festival rituals while Hindus young and old come from neighboring towns to beg her favor and celebrate her glory To Lakshm

Nuncio Urges Pro-Poor’ Plan to Close Nations’ Rich-Poor GapThe Vatican nuncio to the United Nations said on Nov. 6 that growing inequalities both between and within states should be countered with promotion of economic growth that was pro-poor. Archbishop Renato R. Martino said, More pro

Catholic social teaching calls us to identify with newcomers, who together with those long settled enjoy a litany of rights based on our common human dignity. Migrants serve as the church’s analogy for itself (a pilgrim church) and for the human condition (a pilgrim people). They recall our an

Bangladesh lies on the other side of the world, but it came a bit closer when a missionary working there stopped by America House for a visit during a recent trip to the United States. Bill Christensen, a Marianist priest who has been in Bangladesh since 1986, founded the Institute of Integrated Rur

Louis-Marie Chauvet professor of sacramental theology at the Institut Catholique in Paris is not widely known this side of the Atlantic His first work published in the United States Symbol and Sacrament A Sacramental Reinterpretation of Christian Existence caught the eye of many sacramental th

We sometimes imagine that the besieged and occasionally violent form of religiosity known as fundamentalism is a uniquely Islamic trait. This is not the case. As Karen Armstrong has written, fundamentalism is a global fact and has surfaced in every major faith in response to the problems of modernit

On Nov. 20, 1581, the British Jesuit Edmund Campion, along with two others, was tried and found guilty of high treason. As he refused to abjure his faith or his priesthood, Queen Elizabeth I ordered him to be hanged, drawn and quartered. A man of deep Christian charity and missionary zeal, this mart

Paterson, N.J., is not a place name likely to strike a chord of recognition in the minds of Americans elsewhere in the country. Literary types might recall that the poet-physician William Carlos Williams had his office there, and that one of his most famous poems is named after this once-prosperous

In 1996 Jack Miles won the Pulitzer Prize for biography with a learned gripping semi-plausible flight of fancy Since the Hebrew Bible is doubtlessamong other thingsa collection of stories about a figure or figures Elohim Yahweh El Shaddai etc whom Westerners have agreed to call God Miles p

T C Boyle rsquo s collected short stories 1998 amply confirmed his impressive imagination and facility with language and narration In these 16 new ones nine of which appeared in The New Yorker in recent years Boyle again displays his ease in entering the minds of his principal characters and

Ever since I learned to read, I have wanted to be a fiction writer. The vocation was inchoate at first, for books seem as authorless as rain to a child, but it insisted that I not only inhabit the world imagined by others, as good readers do, but go on with the story, configure it to fit my own life

Different FindingsWhile I agree with the Rev. James Garneau’s basic premise in “More Priestly Fraternity” (10/22) that priests need and deserve communities of support, my own research and other studies on seminaries over the past 20 years would yield different findings on a number

Synod RoundupCalling the Synod of Bishops that met in October almost a new beginning for the church, Pope John Paul II urged bishops to promote church teaching courageously and work for church unity. During a Mass in St. Peter’s Basilica at the closing of the synod on Oct. 27, the pope praise

Anational symposium titled Breaking New Ground in Mission was held in Shillong, India, from July 5 to 9, 2001, in which leading missiologists, pastors and experts participated. At the symposium the conviction was widespread that we cannot have any meaningful discourse on mission evangelization witho