Harvesting Organs from Cadavers An Ethical Challenge
“We are being pressured to participate in non-heartbeating cadaver organ transplants at our hospital, and we don’t think it is ethical,” commented the I.C.U. director of a major medical center. He and his staff opposed the process that removes life-sustaining ventilation from a ter
A Cautionary Tale
Catholic health care is a ministry whose deep roots can be traced back to the healing works of Jesus and to the compassionate care of religious women and men and laypersons around the world over many centuries. Though never easy, working in this ministry has become increasingly difficult with the ri
Abuses of Another Kind
I think it was in the early 1980’s that I met a fellow Jesuit at a conference on liberation theology and philosophy. As I recall, we were discussing a book I had written, Following Christ in a Consumer Society. He liked its political and cultural analysis, but found my emphasis on the vows, es
Architects of Success
Although parents may well attend whatever church makes their children feel most welcome, young people are not as likely to attend a church simply because it appeals to their parents. Win over the youth and perhaps win the whole family. If this anecdote is reasonable, the future of the Catholic Churc
Of Many Things
Of Many Things
I first heard of Epica at my former parish in Washington, D.C. Several staff members attended its main Sunday Mass, and one was married there. The acronym stands for Ecumenical Program on Central America and the Caribbean. Its mission statement describes the 30-year-old group as an ecumenical faith-
Letters
Letters
Gospel Message
Thanks to John R. Donahue, S.J., for his beautiful, reassuring words, so badly needed in the shadowy dim and darkness of this unusual Eastertide (The Word, 4/1).
For the past four or five weeks, our local newspaper has featured a major news feature almost every day on some aspect of priestly misconduct. For all Catholics,…
Editorials
Executing the Mentally Retarded
Should Mentally retarded people be executed? That the question is even being posed shows how deeply entrenched capital punishment remains in the United States. But this is the question now under consideration by the Supreme Court. The court’s decision will determine whether executions of peopl
Faith in Focus
Fundamentally, It’s Love
For longer than I knew, my father’s Arabic-language Bible lay on the dining table, a thick, gold-leafed tome, warm and fragile with years of page-turning, the family’s sacred text that had sustained Dad on his long journey from Syria to America. That Bible now sits atop my own bookshelf.
Books
What Johnny Needs Most
Finding quality child care in America is almost every parent rsquo s quest or nightmare Presently 13 million American children out of a population of 21 million are in child care Half of those in child care spend 35 hours or more a week in some facility away from the home One-third of the chil
Sustaining Baby
While the majority of the 53 000 babies born prematurely each year in the United States would have died soon after birth if they had been born years ago this improvement is not an unmitigated success story since a good number of these children will endure long-term suffering and disability John L
Offensive Realism
John Mearsheimer the R Wendell Harrison Distinguished Service Professor of Political Science at the University of Chicago has a gift for generating controversy In an address he gave in 1997 to the entering freshman class about the aims of an undergraduate education Mearsheimer argued that Chica
Poetry
Mignonette
My father planted, every May,
The Word
Waiting for a Good Lawyer
A courtroom dramawhether it is a John Grisham novel a prime time TV series or one of a host of films from To Kill a Mockingbird to Philadelphiaprovides enduring fascination Especially common are plots pitting a little-known lawyer defending a victimized client against powerful adversaries This
Time to Move Out
In one of the annual preached retreats I was subjected to as a young Jesuit the director presented a vivid picture of the ascension long before the age of shuttle launchings As Jesus rose heavenward he saw Jerusalem Nazareth Galilee Asia Minor Greece and finally Rome This is precisely what
Culture
Blooding the Ghosts
For the past several hundred years, since the invention of the printing press and the dissemination of books in fact, the most frequent encounter with the poem has been with what we find on the page. But that is not the way poetry was meant to be experiencedany more, I suppose, than Scripture should
News
Signs of the Times
Vatican Summit Seen as First Step in Solving Abuse CrisisBy convening a summit meeting with U.S. cardinals, the Vatican has sent the strongest signal to date that it views the clergy sex abuse scandals as a grave crisisnot just for the dioceses involved but for the entire church in the United States
Politics
Faith
Culture
Vatican
Scripture
Podcasts