Once upon a time.... With these words, the power of story comes alive for children whose imaginations are the doorway to identity and meaning in life. Whether read aloud or viewed on the wide screen of Disney’s media kingdom, the myths of childhood can be a healthy aspect of development. On th

With their eyes so set on heaven Protestant Evangelicals either are unconcerned about such earthly matters as politics or their vision of a world rooted in a literal interpretation of the Bible makes them move in right-wing circles As a result they are the strategic allies of dictators multinat

Shock, denial, anger and depression swept the country on Sept. 11 as the nation watched thousands of civilians and military people viciously murdered by terrorists. Not since Pearl Harbor has the United States suffered such a devastating attack on its soil, and the number of dead exceeds those kille

This month 12 Georgetown Prep seniors, some still damp from post-game showers, will gather at dusk in the school chapel to begin a semester-long journey with St. Ignatius Loyola. After Mass (and fortified by the requisite pizza) these 17-year-olds will be introduced to the basic elements of what is

Feeling wooed? You should be, at least according to pundits and Washington insiders. It seems that 2001 has been the year for courting the Catholic vote. The term burst on the scene shortly after the inauguration and has consistently shown up in news stories ever since, particularly with respect to

One of the more interesting and paradoxical characters in the debate over capital punishment is the person on the political right who attempts to combine the libertarian suspicion of the state with support for capital punishment Such a person like George W Bush or Ronald Reagan affirms that the

A friend recently asked me whether the Catholic Church, in its opposition to embryonic stem cell research, is committing a folly equal to its condemnation of Galileo. An apt question: the dawn of genetics is as revolutionary as the idea that the earth moved around the sun. Galileo’s tool was t

My first encounter with homelessness came when I was 10 or 12. Passing a friend’s house in my hometown in Maryland late one summer afternoon, I was amazed to see two people sound asleep at the edge of the wooded lot next door: a man and a woman who evidently had no place to stay for the night.

Roads lie buried here

The Declaration Dominus Iesus, issued in September 2000 by the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, aroused deep concern among many Jews and not a few Catholics. Let me first survey the specific areas of concern, then proceed to address the question of whether or not Jews can plausibly be sai

She was walking down the hospital corridor in stocking feet, a tall, striking woman with long hair and the head-covering of an observant Jew. We must have said a quick hello. It was a mutual recognition of an experience shared but not articulated: so you too are here because your kid has a brain tum

The more particular the focus goes one literary axiom the more universal its resonance Robert Frost rsquo s New England or William Faulkner rsquo s ldquo little postage stamp of Mississippi rdquo evoke worldwide response and admiration because the very palpability of their specific worlds will

The Jesuit John Dear once asked God for a sign Not only did he ask for a sign he gave God a timetable right now Heaven apparently was shaken The sign was granted immediately On the spot Dear was 21 at the time and only weeks away from entering the Society of Jesus Dear felt the best way to pr

In an age when the Taliban invoke religion to justify demolishing statues of Buddha, it is heartening to learn of a Catholic jurist who used all of his powers of argument to prevent the burning of Jewish books. Better still to learn that the legal text through which he accomplished this feat is now,

The Key WordCongratulations to Francis A. Sullivan, S.J., for his article, “The Magisterium in the New Millennium” (8/27). Father Sullivan feels he has no “prophetic gifts” with which to foresee how the magisterium will be exercised in the future. I believe he is a prophet fo

French Bishop Convicted of Silence in Child Abuse CaseBishop Pierre Pican of the Diocese of Bayeux-Lisieux in Normandy, was convicted of keeping quiet about a priest who sexually abused children. He received a three-month suspended sentence. The priest, René Bissey, was sentenced to 18 years in pri

In the era of air travel and bullet trains what most people understand by ldquo pilgrimage rdquo says Anne McPherson is ldquo a beeline trip to a distant goal rdquo She herself has lived by an older French notion ldquo walking to the saints rdquo For the pilgrims to the shrine of St Jam

The international team of Panayiotis Zavos, of the University of Kentucky, and Servino Antinori of Rome, Italy, and a group called the Raelians, who think humans were made by aliens using genetic technologies, have both announced that they are moving forward on the human cloning project. The Raelian