Five years ago last October, the superior general of the Jesuits, Peter-Hans Kolvenbach, delivered a historic address at Santa Clara University in California, urging that the promotion of justice should have a central place in Jesuit higher education. Father Kolvenbach was not simply innovating. Ten
Since the beginning of the war in Iraq on March 20, 2003, Americans have encountered Shiite Islam in the media more frequently than at any time since the taking of the hostages in Tehran, when the American Embassy in Iran was occupied on Nov. 4, 1979, and Americans were held hostage for 444 days. As
Recently I taught theology in South Africa, at St. Joseph’s Theological Institute in Pietermaritzburg. Hot and humid in late summer, 50 miles from the Indian Ocean, Pietermaritzburg in the state of KwaZulu-Natal is the city where in 1893 Gandhi was thrown off a train because he was not white,
Until the appearance on Jan. 25 of Pope Benedict’s XVI’s first encyclical, Deus Est Caritas, observers had been searching with little success for hints of the new pope’s mind. Some conservatives have felt particularly stymied by the lack of red-meat decrees and denunciations. Wary
Imperial Presence
I write to commend the effort of Peter J. Donaldson (A Century Behind, 1/16) to present the situation of poverty and illiteracy in Burkina Faso, the former Upper Volta. His account gives urgency to the concerted effort to make poverty history in Africa. Africans
Immigration issues continue to roil the waters of Congress, with the president himself caught in their turbulence. Mr. Bush traveled to the Southwest in November to promote again his plan for a guest worker program. This time, however, his reform proposal contains some harsh elements intended to soo
Many consider Karl Rahner one of the greatest Catholic theologians of the past century Indeed he has been deemed a contemporary father of the church Now Rahner has the honor of a volume in the prestigious Cambridge Companion series The Rahner volume has been edited most capably by Declan Marmion