Of Many Things

Next to religious leaders, the New Testament is hardest on the rich. Serving God and Mammon don’t mix, we are told. Getting a rich man to heaven is about as easy as passing a camel through the eye of a needle. And so on. But as the son of a rich man, I want you to know there’s another si

If you pay close attention, you will come upon the word (or concept) model in some form or other on many pages of this week’s issue. Although it is a familiar concept, in my opinion we don’t hear about it nearly as much as we ought. Writers have lamented in these pages and elsewhere: Whe

Of course, there were differences of opinion about "Jesus," the two-part movie shown on the CBS-TV network in mid-May. There were intense differences of opinion about the film's hero during his earthly lifetime, and there have been radical differences of opinion ever since he died on a

The day after Cardinal O’Connor’s death I received a package delivered by U.P.S. It was from Alba House (Society of St. Paul) and contained a copy of their newest publication, The Life and Times of Archbishop Fulton J. Sheen. The author, Myles P. Murphy, is a New York archdiocesan priest

Every time I see a movie (which is a lot) and a priest or a nun appears on screen (which is not a lot) I steel myself for the worst. Though directors, screenwriters and actors have of late been able to furnish moviegoers with convincing portrayals of, among other difficult subjects, middle-aged toba

The death of cardinal John O’Connor of New York on May 3 marks the end of an era in the American Catholic Church. Without question, he was the most powerful American cardinal of his generation. New York makes a bully pulpit for any archbishop with talent and chutzpah, and Cardinal O’Conn

I’ve already read that, someone answered when I asked whether he had read Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina. What did you think of it? Oh, it was so long ago I can’t rememberit was in college, came the answer. Why not read it again, then? A blank look, as if to imply that it would be a waste

A good deal of the zing has gone out of the race for the presidency now that both John McCain and Bill Bradley have withdrawn. I didn’t realize the intellectual loss until last month, as I listened to Al Gore being interviewed by Jim Lehrer. Lehrer brought up the topic of abortion. Gore chose

Channel surfing a few months ago, I was mildly astonished to come across a rerun of Davey and Goliath, the Eisenhower-era claymation series produced, as I recall, under the auspices of the Lutheran Church. For those of you who weren’t TV-addicted children in the 1960’s, Davey and Goliath

The day after returning from a conference in Washington, D.C., in late February on the persistence of hunger in the United States, I took the subway to the upper west side of Manhattan to hear Mario Cuomo speak on a similar theme. His address was part of a forum called "The Intransigence of Pov