Weakland Asked to Stop Cathedral RenovationsThe Vatican has asked Archbishop Rembert G. Weakland, O.S.B., of Milwaukee to suspend renovation of that diocese’s cathedral in response to complaints from critics of the project who hired a canon lawyer to press their case in Rome. The Vatican wants

This short but worthwhile book takes its title from Franklin Delano Roosevelt rsquo s 1941 State of the Union address By the third freedom after freedom of speech and freedom of worship the president meant freedom from want But as George McGovernformer senator and Democratic presidential nomine

The tale begins in the spring of 1945 when a war-weary world began to prepare for peace and dream of freedom The delegates of 50 nations who gathered in San Francisco that April forged a charter for the United Nations that pledged each nation to promote the rights of all individuals No one had y

Ever since Seattle erupted into a free-trade fighting zone during the World Trade Organization’s 1999 meeting, the very scheduling of a global economic gathering has become a provocation to activists worldwide. What happened suddenly in Seattle has been transformed into rituals of resistance l

In novels such as Mary Reilly and Italian Fever Valerie Martin made her reputation balancing historical locations and characters with the social detail that we expect from comedies of manners She has excelled in tracing how undercurrents of emotion become visible flirting with the Gothic traditi

Consistory of Cardinals Meets with PopeIn the largest meeting of its kind ever held at the Vatican, more than 150 cardinals joined Pope John Paul II to discuss questions of collegiality, dialogue and evangelization in the church. The pope opened the consistory, which met from May 21 to 24, with a pr

More than 80 years ago, the British historian Lytton Strachey (1880-1932) made a name for himself by writing short biographies that debunked their subjects, but did so with elegance and wit. He combined the style of a minor Evelyn Waugh with the slant of a demolition expert like Robert Caro, whose s

For the first time in the nation’s various wars on drugs, the scientific, political and spiritual stars are aligned for a revolution to balance and strengthen all four legs of this country’s effort to tackle substance abuse and addiction: research, prevention, treatment and law enforceme

Niall Ferguson is one of the leading mdash and almost certainly the most controversial mdash historian in contemporary Britain He last shocked his compatriots with The Pity of War which argued that Britain was as much to blame as Germany for World War I that the war could have been avoided and th