John A. Coleman

Tuesday s decision of the three judge panel for the Ninth Circuit court which covers the western states of the United States declaring California Proposition 8 as unconstitutional still leaves many murky issues about the constitutionality of same sex marriage The 89 page decision endorsed by two

I had occasion recently to write a longer essay on measuring the comparative well-being of nations which will appear in a Dutch-Flemish Jesuit journal Streven Many may know that the two Nobel economics laureates Joseph Stiglitz and Armartya Sen joined others in preparing a document for France s

I saw Alexsei nbsp Fedorchenko s extraordinarily lovely if melancholic Russian-language film Silent Souls on the same day i attended a funeral for a fifty-five year old Down syndrome friend nbsp the brother of a good friend Eulogies at funerals rarely touch me much but the four given for Jimmy

I was given as a gift a copy of Michael Casey s Fully Human Fully Divine Ligouri Press 2004 by someone whom I meet with regularly in spiritual direction He claimed he found the book a remarkable resource for his own prayer and reflection Casey a Trappist monk in Tarrawara Australia is

I finagled an invitation from Governor Jerry Brown we had known one another in high school and for the brief time he was a Jesuit seminarian to attend his by invitation only conference on extreme climate risks and California s future held Dec 15th at the Academy of Science San Francisco The

Tennessee Williams was born March 25 1911 in Columbus Mississippi the grandson of an Episcopal rector he moved north to Saint Louis at seven when his itinerant shoe salesman father Cornelius got a job there in a shoe factory Years later Williams father yanked Tennessee then called Tom fr

nbsp nbsp nbsp nbsp The Jesuit playwright Bill Cain S J has been on quite a roll It had been almost twwnty years between Cain s first play Stand-Up Tragedy and his next Equivocation which premiered at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival in 2009 and then went on to productions in Los Angeles

I recently spent ten days in Belgium and the Netherlands visiting Amsterdam Antwerp Louvain Leuven and Bruges My purpose for being there was an academic conference in Louvain Each of the cities I visited have lovely Beguine centers and or medieval Beguine churches which I purposefully sought

nbsp nbsp nbsp nbsp nbsp To the best of my knowledge Catholic Social Teaching does not as such have much to say about economic inequalities per se in a society Indirectly it castigates them if they entail the loss of fundamental human rights Catholic Social Teaching endorses not only