From Our Archives

‘Grounded’ explores a new kind of war-making.

Catholicism is undergoing an epochal transformation. For more than a millennium dogma has been the hard core of church life, defining who is in and who is out. Partisans have fought over the correct way to define Christian belief; they condemned their opponents and persecuted them as heretics.In thi

There is an oddly anachronistic feel to talk about the abolition of nuclear weapons. Like watching Civil Defense films of the 1960s, contemporary calls to ban the bomb provoke a disorienting déjà vu, recalling a different, more paranoid and dangerous time. After all, with the Cold War over—s

April 17, 2015Santa MartaHumiliation for its own sake is masochism, but when it is suffered and endured in the name of the Gospel it makes us like Jesus. That was what Pope Francis said in his homily at the Mass at Casa Santa Marta, as he invited Christians to never cultivate sentiments of hatred, b

In a five-part series released the week of March 16th from the National Catholic Reporter, "God’s Community in the Castro," a parishioner from San Francisco’s Most Holy Redeemer parish had this to say about his spiritual home: "We don't see ourselves as a gay comm

The first act of violence in the funny, harrowing new play Hand to God is visited upon a helpless hand puppet. A shy, ambivalent teen, Jason, is trying to persuade his widowed mother to excuse him and Tyrone, the mangy homemade puppet that seems to have taken up permanent residence on Jason’s

It is 5:30 a.m., June 1995, as the rising sun breaks into my little backstreet hotel room in Hanoi, and the light trampling of hundreds of feet padding past my window shakes me out of bed and into my shorts and sneakers to join the multitude of morning runners. The mass is heading toward West Lake,

Reading a Marilynne Robinson novel is like going to church. Her books put us into conversation with the Bible, “a great ancient literature” (her words) whose powerful stories reveal their meanings gradually in multiple and ongoing ways. They posit a community of people who take their fai