Does God Communicate With Me?
You say that God wants to engage in a relationship of mutuality with each of us, and you indicate that God communicates with us. But I don’t hear God speaking to me. I can imagine someone responding in this way to my article Why Do You Pray? (Am. 6/4). I would like to answer the…
The Pilgrim Community’s Independent Voice
Contemporary Catholics find it difficult to articulate the relationship between their faith and their political commitments. When it comes to the traditional left-right spectrum, the body of social teaching developed by the church on the death penalty, abortion, the economy, the family, welfare and
Is the End Near In Northern Ireland?
As part of an ecumenical group from Northern Ireland, I visited San Francisco about 10 years ago. After we had made a presentation, a young man asked why I was so opposed to the violence being committeed by the Irish Republican Army. I repeated the arguments I had given in my talk: that violence in
Of Many Things
Of Many Things
In the summer of 1219, Francis of Assisi traveled to Egypt with the hope of converting the Saracens from Islam to Christianity. He stayed with some crusaders, who told him his mission was impossible and could easily cost him his life. Francis ignored the warnings and managed to secure an audience wi
Letters
Letters
Nonviolent Tradition
While America and Catholic leaders across the world scramble to determine whether U.S. military action against terrorism meets just war criteria and how indeed we might satisfy those criteria, I am disturbed by the insistence on linking just war principles to Catholic tradition. They are Catholic in the sense that the Crusades were Catholic…
Editorials
Community of Faith
The pastoral message Living With Faith and Hope After September 11, which the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops issued during its meeting in mid-November in Washington, D.C., promises to be a landmark document. It certainly provides inspiring material for preaching in the months ahead, as
Faith in Focus
For People With Cancer and Other Troubles’
Kathleen and I make all the arrangements mothers have to make to spend a day away from their childrenbefore-school care, after-school care, instructions and emergency information. Everything is in order for us to be gone from early morning to late afternoon. We have 100 miles to go each way. She ins
Books
Moving With the Times
In the summer of 1961 I asked the proprietor of a Catholic bookstore in Paris whether he had a copy of Yves Congar rsquo s True and False Reform in the Church After looking around he took me into a back office and from a bottom drawer pulled out a copy of the book Only…
Travels and Travails
I began writing my review of John Updike rsquo s new collection of poems Americana during the week of Sept 11 and froze unable to inch forward as the ironies in a book that begins with 15 poems about seeing America from the air compounded and screamed back at me Poems with titles like ldquo…
Film
Jaded and Grumpy: The Curse of the Jade Scorpion
Even by the generous criteria generally applied to summer films, last summer was a particularly disappointing season. Vacation movies target young audiences with young themes, and, as a result, they emerge half-baked from the minds of young, or wannabe young, filmmakers. Okay, I plead nolo contender
The Word
Dining With Wolf and Lamb
Another year winds down the days grow ever shorter and this Advent seems especially gray a time When yellow leaves or none or few do hang Upon those boughs which shake against the cold Bare ruin 39 d choirs where late the sweet birds sang Shakespeare Sonnet 73 Despite exhortations and
Columns
An Advent of Mourning
Advent beckons, and still the mourning continues in and around New York. The news brings stories of battlefield successes in Afghanistan and heartening reports of men and women celebrating their liberation from the Taliban. But the war news brings little cheer to many homes in the New York area. The
News
Signs of the Times
Trappists in South Carolina Open New Library to the Ecumenical CommunityOn Sunday, Nov. 11, the Trappist community at Mepkin Abbey, outside Charleston, S.C., dedicated the new Clare Boothe Luce Library. Located near the burial site of the Congresswoman, ambassador, journalist and playwright, the $3
Politics
Faith
Culture
Vatican
Scripture
Podcasts