The trial of Slobodan Milosevic dramatizes the new worldwide demand for accountability for public officials who violate internationally recognized human rights That demand is behind the international court and may soon be ratified by enough votes to make it operational worldwide These momentous ev

Cardinals Give Measured Support to Retaliatory AttacksAmerican cardinals, speaking separately, have given measured support for the retaliatory strikes launched by American and British forces against military targets and suspected terrorist camps in Afghanistan. This is a just war, declared Cardinal

The welfare reform law of 1996 comes up for reauthorization by Congress a year from now. When enacted, it represented an end to the three-decades-old entitlement to public assistance for poor Americans, who have subsequently been pushed toward work in the expectation that they would become self-suff

Passionate LanguageThank you for the Oct. 1 issue. I was particularly touched by the essays by Patricia Kossmann and James Martin, S.J., and I thought your editorial was persuasive. Under a variety of Catholic insights on prayer, the Eucharist and goodness itself, America provides some significant

To draft principles and norms of translation for the nearly 800 vernacular languages of the Catholic world is a formidable taska task that should involve the broadest consultation of episcopal conferences as well as liturgical and biblical scholars. The Authentic Liturgy (Liturgiam Authenticam), a 3

Dorothee Soelle is well known for her seminal book on suffering Entitled simply Suffering it provoked much-needed discussion on the relation of theology to suffering In the winter years of a long career as a theologian as an activist in peace and ecological movements as an opponent of every for

The bitter grievances that many in the poor nations have against the rich nations produced two explosions last month, one actual and one figurative. The terrorist attacks on Sept. 11 were as real as death. The quarrels that nearly blew up the United Nations Conference on Racism amounted to a symboli

A Deeper LookIn my search for meaning and the words to express it, Cardinal Avery Dulles provides a profound perspective. His reflections on the Shoah (9/17) apply equally to the incineration and crushing of over 6,000 people on Sept. 11. Following Cardinal Dulles’s sage advice, I have asked m

Pope’s Visit Produces Ecumenical Firsts Two ecumenical firsts occurred when Pope John Paul II visited Armenia at the invitation of the Armenian Apostolic Church, an ancient and independent Oriental Orthodox church that in recent years has improved its relations with the Vatican. He stayed at t

At first reading I thought Ronald Hill rsquo s tack toward poverty somewhat puzzling coming from someone whose specialty is social science and public policy I had expected many more statistical tables and analytic categories Basically through a compilation of data from those he interviewed and

Samuel Taylor Coleridge 1772-1834 believed that one of the great miseries of his time was that it recognized no medium between Literal and Metaphorical it ignored the symbolic Too many of his age still followed the lead of 18th-century writers philosophers who distrusted mystery and poets who d

Eudora Welty, who died on July 23 at the age of 92, will remain forever for me a Southern gentlewoman who honed her writing skills to do her life’s work: create lasting literature. She lived in Mississippi throughout the era of the civil rights movement, seemingly apart from the fray. But she

Young adult Catholics are legion. Statistical surveys indicate as much. Yet when I step over the threshold of my parish church, I see very few of my peers.

As this issue goes to press, we are a little over three weeks removed from the day terror struck. It has been a time of intense and widespread prayer on both small and grand scales. We hear people constantly talking about faith, about the comfort they find knowing that God hears. Such was a conversa

Slowly over the past 25 years in the United States the old belief in free will has been replaced by a pseudo-scientific belief in determinism Faulty genes bad brain chemistry neurotransmitters gone bonkersthese are some of our postmodern excuses In American Exorcism however Michael Cuneo does

Perhaps I should have known from the title that Robert Morgan rsquo s new novel is about faith Before I could reflect on the title and try to puzzle out a reference point for it I was caught up in the story Morgan is like that You leaf through a page or two and suddenly the narrative has swept y

I knew the hate would be coming, but not with such ferocity, such immediacy and such prominence. Time magazine’s specially rushed issue portraying the World Trade Center atrocity ran one opinion piece, on its last written page. It was Lance Morrow’s Case for Rage and Retribution. But it

These recent weeks I have been musing dreamlike over my seven Jesuit decades. Time and again I was struck by a line from that ever so popular hymn Amazing Grace. Eight monosyllables: ’Tis grace hath brought me safe thus far. Grace. Not some vague abstraction. Rather, God’s ceaseless pres