Jesuit School Spotlight
Jesuit High School women’s basketball player heads to the N.C.A.A.
Sofia Bell was recently selected to play in the 2023 McDonald’s All-American Games and had offers from schools like Gonzaga, Notre Dame and Stanford.
Of Many Things
The synod is not an event. It’s a new way of being church.
“Our communion is unsure of itself.” We must “recover a sense of what holds us together.” The stakes are very high for our church, and listening to one another is the first step on a much longer journey.
Your Take
Reckoning with the church’s record on slavery: Our readers respond
Read the responses to Christopher J. Kellerman, S.J., on the Catholic Church’s history with slavery. Comments were gathered from the online version of the article.
Editorials
Repentance and Holiness: The True Meaning of Lent
That the Lord seeks not to punish us for our sins but to call us all back to holiness is a conviction so strong among theologians in the church in the modern age that it risks becoming a truism.
Short Take
Pope Francis, not Adam Smith, is right: A belated apology to my Econ 101 students
I introduced students to a worldview completely at odds with the one expressed by Pope Francis. In doing so, I rationalized greed and dismissed the idea of a common good.
Dispatches
Do Catholics care about climate change?
A recent Pew survey found that overall Catholics show a higher degree of worry about the impact of climate change than other Christian denominations, but the issue appears to divide U.S. Catholics along the same political and racial lines as within the wider public.
‘Do not forget us’: Catholics in Ukraine mark a year of war
The staff and volunteers of Caritas Ukraine accept a double duty—agents of humanitarian aid but also, with their families, victims and targets of conflict themselves.
Taking the pulse of Latino Catholics on LGBT issues, young people and women’s leadership
The changing demographics of the Catholic Church in the United States raises the question: How well do Cardinal Robert McElroy’s views reflect the various perspectives present in the growing Latino community?
‘It’s genocide’: Brazil’s Catholic bishops on killing of Indigenous Amazon people
Devastated by malnutrition and preventable diseases like flu, pneumonia, anemia, malaria and diarrhea, the Yanomami people have been called victims of a contemporary genocide by government authorities.
GoodNews
A state-funded reentry program stops the revolving door for Colorado’s formerly incarcerated
Prison reform advocates, including the Colorado Criminal Justice Reform Coalition and the Urban Institute, have praised the program for having “dramatically changed the field of re-entry in Colorado.”
Features
Catholicism, authentic communion and the way out of our polarization trap
What is the way out of polarization? And why does that question—along with the now-commonplace observation that society suffers from deepening divisions about everything from gun control to abortion to public funding for religious schools—seem so exhausting?
Could a smartphone destroy my child’s soul? A technological examination of conscience for parents
Technology is undeniably part of our lives. But when should it be introduced to children, used in schools or integrated into their social lives?
Faith and Reason
Like Vatican II, the synod is a dynamic example of the church in history
In a way, maybe we are living all together as baptized Christians in the synodal process in the same way that the council fathers at Vatican II experienced collegiality in their role as bishops.
Faith in Focus
The spirituality of sacristans: What this often overlooked role has to teach the church
Our task as sacristans is to attend to small acts of care in a world that is too often inattentive and careless.
The grace of growing old
It is easy to think of older people as always having existed in their current condition. Does it make us feel younger to think that way? More superior? Perhaps we hope it holds our own mortality at bay.
Books
Review: The return of Cormac McCarthy
‘The Passenger’ and ‘Stella Maris,’ Cormac McCarthy’s elegiac, disputatious and deeply odd pair of new novels, offers a typically offbeat take on American culture and society.
Review: When Botticelli illustrated Dante
With ‘Botticelli’s Secret: The Lost Drawings and the Rediscovery of the Renaissance,’ Joseph Luzzi has written a fascinating narrative that tells the story of the drawings and seeks to revise our understanding of the phenomenon traditionally known as the Renaissance.
Review: The apostle to Alcoholics Anonymous
In Dawn Eden Goldstein’s biography of the Rev. Ed Dowling, we encounter a remarkable individual whose intellect, enthusiasm and humility helped Alcoholics Anonymous burgeon into a worldwide haven for spiritual growth for those struggling with addiction.
Bono and Bob Dylan: Two venerable musicians enter the audiobook world
The creative ways audiobooks are being embraced by like Bono or Bob Dylan are creating a new category of content that is different from conventional book publishing.
Poetry
Even the Cracks
what he called my crab consciousness, merely his description for my either avoiding or digging a hole
Finding the divine in anything and everything: A review of the year in poetry
With great poetry God is not only in the details, but in the details of the details.
Last Take
Bishop Seitz on Biden’s new asylum policy: Death cannot be the cost of our immigration laws
President Biden’s immigration policy and asylum rules are morally deficient, as vulnerable migrants are dying on their way to the United States from their home countries.
Faith
The spirituality of sacristans: What this often overlooked role has to teach the church
Our task as sacristans is to attend to small acts of care in a world that is too often inattentive and careless.
Like Vatican II, the synod is a dynamic example of the church in history
In a way, maybe we are living all together as baptized Christians in the synodal process in the same way that the council fathers at Vatican II experienced collegiality in their role as bishops.
Repentance and Holiness: The True Meaning of Lent
That the Lord seeks not to punish us for our sins but to call us all back to holiness is a conviction so strong among theologians in the church in the modern age that it risks becoming a truism.
Jesuit High School women’s basketball player heads to the N.C.A.A.
Sofia Bell was recently selected to play in the 2023 McDonald’s All-American Games and had offers from schools like Gonzaga, Notre Dame and Stanford.
Taking the pulse of Latino Catholics on LGBT issues, young people and women’s leadership
The changing demographics of the Catholic Church in the United States raises the question: How well do Cardinal Robert McElroy’s views reflect the various perspectives present in the growing Latino community?
The grace of growing old
It is easy to think of older people as always having existed in their current condition. Does it make us feel younger to think that way? More superior? Perhaps we hope it holds our own mortality at bay.
Politics
Faith
Culture
Vatican
Scripture
Podcasts