Columns

Global warming just got personal. Our neighbor is moving because of global warming. As the world warms, small degrees of temperature change bring changes in the weather. Ice caps melt, seas rise, weather patterns become less predictable, storms become more destructive, and coastal peoples and proper

Under the influence of St. Thomas Aquinas, I hold that a soul is a unifying formative source of any living being’s activities and purpose. Thus each individual plant or tree has a soul, a formative cause of its integrated development in its life-activities of growth, healing and reproduction.

Public apologies are all the rage these days, so much so that it’s hard to find a celebrity or newsmaker who hasn’t visited the high priests of the secular confessional, Larry King and Oprah Winfrey, to beg for forgiveness for some petty offense. But the trend is hardly limited to indivi

Lent can be a disorienting, dislocating time, and sometimes it seems that it observes us more than we observe it. Twice recently I had the feeling that Lent was observing me and gently tweaking at my mind and heart, not without a smile on its face. The first of these moments happened in the middle o

More than a quarter-century ago, the Archdiocese of Chicago embarked on what must have seemed a radical idea at the time: catechetical barhopping. Well, that’s probably a bit too glib and irreverent. But it’s also not far from the truth. The program, after all, was called Theology on Tap

Today we took our infant son to the doctor for his regular checkup and vaccinations. We do not relish these visits. We gang up on the baby; I restrain my son’s hands, my husband pins his legs, all so the nurse can administer four different vaccine shots. The baby screams, later becomes letharg

I put my hand in the oven a few weeks ago and scorched myself on the heating element. In normal times this would have been just another domestic accidenta careless mistake for which my skin paid the penalty. But the times were not normal. I was in a dark space following the breakdown of a significan

This is what Yahweh asks of you: only this, to act justly, to love tenderly and to walk humbly with your God Micah 6:8

As Senator Barack Obama explores a presidential bid, media headlines across the country ask, Is America ready for an African-American president? Between 50 percent and 62 percent of Americans polled answer yes, that race is no longer a barrier in the United States. But that this is considered a news

As Congress and the President debate the merits of sending 20,000 more troops to Iraq, a very different cohort of 20,000 troops is trying to prepare for life after the war. They are the men and women who have been wounded in action in Iraqmen and women whose bodies may never be whole again, whose mi