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Books
In our Amazon com Borders rsquo n rsquo Barnes amp Noble world we non-academics at least no longer pay much attention to libraries When was the last time you got worked up over anything connected with a library shortened hours confusing online catalogues Well for many Americans all that
Editorials
The statistics from Sudan appall any decent observer. In the last 17 years, two million persons have been killed, four million have been internally displaced and hundreds of thousands made refugees. Yet the West seems to evince little interest in the hidden holocaust that is consuming Southern Sudan
News
Seventy Percent of Latinos Identify as Catholic, Says SurveyA new national survey reports that 70 percent of the Latino population in the United States identify themselves as Catholic and 22 percent consider themselves Protestant. Forty-five percent of the respondents said they attended church servi
Books
Historians and political scientists endlessly debate the sources of change in human societies What is more important in epochal transformation ideas or institutions personalities or power structures material or intellectual motives In the field of Russian studies the end of the cold war and i
Soaring energy prices rapidly turned last winter into a season of severe discontent. In the Northeast the price of residential heating oil rose by more than 50 percent since the previous winter. In the Midwest homeowners paid at least 60 percent more for natural gas. In California households braced
Faith in Focus
How many times have I uttered those words, sung those jubilant words at Mass, and paid scant heed to their meaning? I’m a poor singer, so mostly I just fake them, scarcely letting a sound escape from a tight mouth and heart. I’ve probably concentrated more on the hairdo of the woman in f
Film
As you might have suspected, neurosis plagues columnists and reviewers. After a quarter century of these near-monthly essays on the state of civilization as mirrored in popular films, I still wonder each time I sit at the word processor if this is the column that will finally reveal, once and for al
During the cold war, the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists became famous for its Doomsday Clock. The position of the hands on the clock showed how close the world was, in the judgment of the publication’s board of directors, to the midnight of mass nuclear annihilation. Every time the directors mo
Has the time come to revive the idea of a national pastoral council for the Catholic Church in the United States a quarter-century after the scheme was effectively abandoned? Opinions will differ on that. But two events this year are reminders that establishing some such body really is part of the u
Letters
Call for HopeHow refreshing it was to see such a hope-filled article (On the Church, 4/23). How good it was to see one of our most respected bishops thoughtfully say, No! There is another way of looking at church! How I wish there were more bishops like Walter Kasper.I write this comment as one who
Of Many Things
My job at America is so enjoyable that sometimes I’m amazed that I get paid for it. Well, I don’t actually get paid for it, or rather, technically I do, though my salary is applied to the Jesuit community by virtue of my vow of poverty and, well...you know what I mean.Anyway, it’s
Books
Niall Ferguson is one of the leading mdash and almost certainly the most controversial mdash historian in contemporary Britain He last shocked his compatriots with The Pity of War which argued that Britain was as much to blame as Germany for World War I that the war could have been avoided and th
The Word
Beginning in January 1977 the nation was captivated by the moving drama ldquo Roots rdquo which told of the origin and earliest days of an African-American family It enabled people to see their African-American brothers and sisters in a new light as a people with a noble heritage who had underg
A conference in Washington, D.C., with hunger as its theme? Some might assume that such a conference would be about hunger in the developing world. At this particular gathering on the first three days of April, however, the focus was on the often-hidden but widespread levels of hunger that pose a se
Hopkins seems to think the whole universe is wonderful. I have a friend who just told me yesterday he has brain cancer. What does Hopkins have to say to him? A student at Loyola University Chicago asked this question recently in a class on Victorian literature, during a discussion of the English Jes
Growth, growth, growth: this is the experience of Nativity-type middle schools—schools often based in whole or in part on a model developed at the Jesuit-sponsored Nativity Mission Center School in New York City, which began in 1971. Over three dozen schools are well established; others are ei
Faith in Focus
Several years ago, while I sat at my desk one morning at Continuum, an AIDS agency in San Francisco where I served as executive director, the phone rang. The caller identified herself as a secretary to the First Lady and asked if I would come to the White House for a community leaders’ forum l
Books
During World War II Arthur M Schlesinger Jr held a modest position in Elmer Davis rsquo s Office of War Information One of his few thrills was ghostwriting low-level messages for President Roosevelt Schlesinger recollects My first success was a presidential endorsement of Universal Bible Sunday
Letters
Lucan Glitch
In Cardinal Walter Kasper’s article, On the Church (4/23), there is a puzzling paragraph (p. 11, top of first column): In the Gospel of Luke, the word ecclesia can signify a domestic community as well as a local community; further, Luke already has a theological conception of the universal church. The word ecclesia doesn’t occur at all in the Gospel of Luke. Is the Cardinal talking rather about Luke’s Acts of the Apostles?
George Ratermann, M.M.
The Word
For almost four years Tuesdays With Morrie has appeared on the best-seller list of The New York Times It is a moving account by Mitch Albom of conversations with his dying mentor Morrie Schwartz who had earlier taught a course on ldquo The Meaning of Life rdquo and now unfolded even deeper mean