Hotly in Pursuit of the Real
Ever since I learned to read, I have wanted to be a fiction writer. The vocation was inchoate at first, for books seem as authorless as rain to a child, but it insisted that I not only inhabit the world imagined by others, as good readers do, but go on with the story, configure it…
Informing and Forming Terror
It was chilling to read, to see the pictures. The Sunday New York Times Magazine of Oct. 21 displayed a pictorial interview with five of Jihad’s Women, associated with one of the 100 Pakistan religious schools for Muslim females. (There are 10,000 such schools for boys in the country.)A woman
Muriel Spark
On Nov. 20, 1581, the British Jesuit Edmund Campion, along with two others, was tried and found guilty of high treason. As he refused to abjure his faith or his priesthood, Queen Elizabeth I ordered him to be hanged, drawn and quartered. A man of deep Christian charity and missionary zeal, this mart
Rethinking Mission in India
Anational symposium titled Breaking New Ground in Mission was held in Shillong, India, from July 5 to 9, 2001, in which leading missiologists, pastors and experts participated. At the symposium the conviction was widespread that we cannot have any meaningful discourse on mission evangelization witho
Evolution, Evil and Original Sin
Of all the puzzles of existence that challenge our religious ideas, none cause more anguish and more crises of faith than suffering, death and evil. From the dawn of human sensibility these have resisted what Leibnitz called theodicy—vindication of the justice of God. Even today, many thinkers
Of Many Things
Of Many Things
Paterson, N.J., is not a place name likely to strike a chord of recognition in the minds of Americans elsewhere in the country. Literary types might recall that the poet-physician William Carlos Williams had his office there, and that one of his most famous poems is named after this once-prosperous
Letters
Letters
Different FindingsWhile I agree with the Rev. James Garneau’s basic premise in “More Priestly Fraternity” (10/22) that priests need and deserve communities of support, my own research and other studies on seminaries over the past 20 years would yield different findings on a number
Editorials
Islam and Modernity
We sometimes imagine that the besieged and occasionally violent form of religiosity known as fundamentalism is a uniquely Islamic trait. This is not the case. As Karen Armstrong has written, fundamentalism is a global fact and has surfaced in every major faith in response to the problems of modernit
Faith in Focus
St. Jack, Pray for Us!
In a trenchant article that appeared in The Atlantic Monthly in 1998, the Harvard theologian Harvey Cox argued that the God of contemporary culture was The Market. Think about it, wrote Professor Cox: The Market moves in mysterious ways, it is believed to be omniscient, it boasts its own caste of pr
Books
Redemptive Suicide?
In 1996 Jack Miles won the Pulitzer Prize for biography with a learned gripping semi-plausible flight of fancy Since the Hebrew Bible is doubtlessamong other thingsa collection of stories about a figure or figures Elohim Yahweh El Shaddai etc whom Westerners have agreed to call God Miles p
The Cyprus Connection
The Mountain of Silence is a personal search by a recently reconverted agnostic sociologist into the world of Orthodox spirituality Like most Western academics I associated the representative of institutionalized religion if not with narrow-mindedness intolerance and corruption then at least w
Books That Speak Volumes
I wonder if there is a new fascination for books about books especially those books we call classics Recently a group of sketches by Italo Calvino was published as Why Read the Classics Not long ago David Denby offered Great Books My Adventures With Homer Rousseau Woolf and Other Indestructib
More Mania Irrelevancyor Extinction?Try It, You’ll Like It
T C Boyle rsquo s collected short stories 1998 amply confirmed his impressive imagination and facility with language and narration In these 16 new ones nine of which appeared in The New Yorker in recent years Boyle again displays his ease in entering the minds of his principal characters and
Irrelevancyor Extinction?
John Cornwell rsquo s latest effort at faithful constructive criticism following his highly controversial Hitler rsquo s Pope focuses on the factions and divisions within Roman Catholicism that virtually every Catholic experiences to a greater or lesser degree In a brief first chapter A Catholi
Try It, You’ll Like It
William J O rsquo Malley S J has been teaching theology for the past 30 years and has written a score of books In the introduction to his newest Choosing to Be Catholic he identifies the audience he hopes to attract those considering or participating in the Rite of Christian Initiation of Ad
The Word
Future Shock
The readings today leave most Catholics ill at ease and puzzled and they often relegate their message to fundamentalist television evangelists shouting about the coming end of the world Malachi thought that the day of the Lord was coming and it did not come Jesus says that ldquo this generation
News
Signs of the Times
Synod RoundupCalling the Synod of Bishops that met in October almost a new beginning for the church, Pope John Paul II urged bishops to promote church teaching courageously and work for church unity. During a Mass in St. Peter’s Basilica at the closing of the synod on Oct. 27, the pope praise
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