This past autumn’s Supreme Court confirmation battles could be used as material for a short course in jurisprudence. Lesson One: Roe v. Wade Overshadows Everything (Why does abortion dominate American law and politics to a degree unheard of elsewhere in the world?). Lesson Two: Rights Absoluti
From Our Archives
Posted inFrom Our Archives
Did It Happen? Is It True?
Several years ago I gave a talk on the Book of Genesis to a full parish hall. After explaining that Chapters 2 to 11 are traditional stories rather than historical reports, I was confronted by an angry questioner: If these stories are fables, then what can we believe? What about Moses? What about th
Posted inFrom Our Archives
Biologist and Believer
It is amazing how many people are trying to find problems where there aren’t any. The culprits are prejudice and ignorance. Of course, nobody likes to be called prejudiced or ignorant, especially if it may be true. The creation- versus-evolution controversy is loaded with confusion caused by t
Posted inFrom Our Archives
Global Trade and the Common Good
In his encyclical on the Eucharist, Ecclesia de Eucharistia, published in 2003, Pope John Paul II repeated St. Paul’s admonition to the early church: “[I]t is ‘unworthy’ of a Christian community to partake of the Lord’s Supper amid division and indifference towards the
Posted inFrom Our Archives
Best Practices in Church Management
Efforts to improve church management are often sidetracked by three mindsets. First, we can misunderstand the truth that the church is timeless. Of course, Jesus Christ is timeless, some teachings are timeless and much of our worship is timelessbut many other behaviors of the church are time-bound.
Posted inFrom Our Archives
Under the Apricot Trees
My mother, father, little sister and I were living with my widowed grandmother, Frieda Hambleton, in her house in a poor neighborhood of Wichita Falls, Tex. We were crowded, but it was what I had always known, and I was happy. Then she built a house on Grant Street, in the developing part of the cit
Posted inFrom Our Archives
Joy and Hope, Grief and Anguish
Forty years ago, on Dec. 7, 1965, the Second Vatican Council issued its “Pastoral Constitution on the Church in the Modern World.” This conciliar text laid out the most challenging vision of the church’s social mission of the modern era. It proclaimed that the Catholic community sh
Posted inFrom Our Archives
Friends in the Lord
From the archives, the story of the early followers of St. Ignatius of Loyola
Posted inFrom Our Archives
Religious Liberty
On Dec. 7 we commemorate the 40th anniversary of the promulgation of the “Declaration on Religious Liberty” (known also by the opening words of the Latin text, Dignitatis Humanae). No other decree of the Second Vatican Council was so controversial, underwent so many trials and setbacks (
Posted inFrom Our Archives
Teaching About the Jesus of Islam
Recently I tried out on my students a new upper-level undergraduate course entitled "The Islamic Jesus." As a Catholic whose research interests range from the Middle East to Pakistan and Indonesia, I am drawn to opportunities for creative forms of interfaith dialogue. This new course certa