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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
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 and the Inquisition was Catholic, but they can hardly be described as Christianif what we mean by Christian is fidelity to the teachings of Christ.

A so-called just war is more humane (in intent, if not in effect) than were the recent terrorist bombings, but please don’t imply that Christ in any way or under any circumstances condoned violence as a response to violence. As Gandhi once remarked, The only people on earth who do not see Christ and his teachings as nonviolent are Christians.

Nan Runde

Faith in Focus
The Sun Is Coming
Monday NightThere is a storm outside. Very unusual for September in the Bay Area. My 20-month-old son and I are watching the lights in the sky and mimicking the sounds of the stormhis first experience of lightning and thunder. At first he is fascinated and roars with the thunder, but he quickly beco
The Parish of Choice
I’ve been in town only a few weeks, and I’m still looking for a good parish to join. How often have we heard Catholics say those words, or something like them? Searching for a worshiping community is a hallmark of Catholic life these days. Moving to a new place, we look for a parish wher
'They' Are 'Us'
Catholic social teaching calls us to identify with newcomers, who together with those long settled enjoy a litany of rights based on our common human dignity. Migrants serve as the church’s analogy for itself (a pilgrim church) and for the human condition (a pilgrim people). They recall our an
Of Many Things
Of Many Things
Bangladesh lies on the other side of the world, but it came a bit closer when a missionary working there stopped by America House for a visit during a recent trip to the United States. Bill Christensen, a Marianist priest who has been in Bangladesh since 1986, founded the Institute of Integrated Rur
Books
Nov 12, 2001 issue
Books That Speak Volumes
Emilie Griffin
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
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 to fit my own life
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
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