When word leaked out that ABC television had commissioned the actor Leonardo DiCaprio to interview President Clinton for a special Earth Day broadcast, the network’s top news executives huffed and puffed and said that surely nobody at ABC news would be so stupidtheir word, not mineto enlist a

A good deal of the zing has gone out of the race for the presidency now that both John McCain and Bill Bradley have withdrawn. I didn’t realize the intellectual loss until last month, as I listened to Al Gore being interviewed by Jim Lehrer. Lehrer brought up the topic of abortion. Gore chose

Art of TranslationBishop Trautman, in his article, Rome and ICEL (3/4), makes no mention of the widespread dissatisfaction expressed by so many with the quality of ICEL’s work, which is no doubt the reason underlying Rome’s intervention. I think the trouble is that ICEL, from the very ou

Though the title might lead one to dismiss this book as just another in the swarm of apocalyptic writings like those by Tim LaHaye Jerry Falwell and Grant R Jeffrey preying on public anxiety over the end of the world and predicting Armageddon and cosmic meltdown this work by a professor of polit

The shooting of a 6-year old girl by a 6-year-old classmate in Flint, Mich., was followed a few weeks later by a 12-year-old’s holding his class hostage with a loaded semiautomatic pistol in Lisbon, Ohio. Events like these, coming so soon after the massacre and suicides at the Columbine High S

Thousands Form Human Chain Around Capitol Against DebtThousands of Americans formed a human chain around the U.S. Capitol on April 9 to urge debt relief for the world’s poorest nations. Sign-bearing union workers, nuns and studentsmany wearing cloth or paper chains to symbolize the enslaving c

Raymond Maloney S J a professor of systematic theology at the Milltown Institute Dublin accomplishes much in this short book on a vexing issue in the history of theology the kind of knowledge that Christ possessed and what that knowledge says about the way God became a human being The issue of

Despite the strong economy that has been a boon for millions of Americans, many others remain locked in a poverty that includes hunger. All but ignored in the current political debate, this dark reality served as the background of a three-day conference held in Washington, D.C., in late February. Ca

The most challenging, the most distressing and yet the most strangely consoling book I have read this year is Annie Dillard’s For the Time Being. It is many things: a string of knotty episodes, a litany of loss, a catalogue of catastrophe, a cry for meaning. Crisscrossing the stories of wise r

The day after returning from a conference in Washington, D.C., in late February on the persistence of hunger in the United States, I took the subway to the upper west side of Manhattan to hear Mario Cuomo speak on a similar theme. His address was part of a forum called "The Intransigence of Pov