In All Things

This weekend I popped in on Turner Classic Movie rsquo s 30 Days of Oscar and caught the last 15 minutes of Steven Spielberg s Close Encounters of the Third Kind nbsp Have you seen it lately If not put it in your queue nbsp It holds up amazingly well This scene of the scientists trying to com

The health care plan President Obama released yesterday is not the plan I would have written Nor is it clear to me that releasing a plan in advance of the bipartisan health care summit on Thursday was the way to go Better to have held the summit and then announced a plan that included significant

Archbishop Timothy Dolan of New York spoke to a packed bar in midtown Manhattan Monday evening for the city s first Theology on Tap lecture of the year His topic of choice was the papacy in honor of the feast of the Chair of Peter and the talk was filled with a number of interesting and entertain

High-school drama departments often are known for being creative mdash although not necessarily their hiring methods But Providence High School a Catholic institution in Burbank California recently attracted attention from the Los Angeles Times after it chose to hire two professional actors ra

Two reports from Britain s Independent Catholic News and Fides indicate how difficult even dangerous it has become to be a Christian in the Middle East and why the pope s call for reciprocity remains so important The first story relates the increasingly precarious position of Christians in Iraq w

The New Liturgical Movement a liturgy website has gathered together some of the new translations of the Propers for Mass here in this online article nbsp 1st Sunday of AdventCollectGrant we pray almighty God that your faithful may resolveto run forth with righteous deeds to meet your

In light of Austen Ivereigh s strong post below on the Irish bishops and his favorable mention of Diarmuid Martin the archbishop of Dublin whose suggestion that the Irish bishops resign did not carry the day here is a long piece by David Gibson on Martin s career and example in the midst of a c

At the CPAC convention last week Congressman Ron Paul won the straw poll in a presidential preference contest Paul was a candidate for president last time round but he failed tow in a single primary although the popularity of his views with some young people created a veneer of enthusiasm that ea

Look at the statements and homilies made by some of the Irish bishops yesterday following their two-day meeting with Pope Benedict XVI and one thing will be perfectly obvious they just don t understand the problem There is plenty there about sin and repentance God s loving and healing mercy and

There were 1 16 billion baptised Catholics in the world in 2008 up 1 7 19m on the previous year and making up 17 4 of the world s population nbsp according to the latest Annuario Pontificio nbsp In the same period the world s population went from 6 6bn to 6 7bn The Catholic share of tha