Contraceptive MentalityI am writing to offer a criticism of your editorial on RU-486 (10/14). I find one of the suggestions in your last paragraph most curiousnamely, your claim that there are people who accept the church’s teaching on contraception but reject her teaching on abortion. Aside f

Flophouse is greater than the sum of its parts That is it is far more than a book of striking photographs of Bowery men and their surroundings with brief accompanying texts Because the four Bowery hotels described in the book are among the last of their kind in New York City the book has an ele

What may even be worse than racism an African-American friend said not long ago is white guilt over racism He went on to quote everyone from Lenny Bruce and the Rev Martin Luther King Jr to W E B Du bois Racism was a problem yes but focusing on what is not being done to balance racial rel

If you are like me, you resent having your name on everyone’s mailing list, receiving direct mail of all sorts, mostly junk, and sometimes having your dinner hour interrupted with telephone solicitations. The scrupulous among us, however, not wanting to miss out on that one, real, authentic of

On Nov. 17, 1953, the secretary of the Holy Office, Cardinal Giuseppe Pizzardo, sent a letter to the Archbishop of Westminster, Cardinal Bernard Griffin. Graham Greene’s book THE POWER AND THE GLORY, it began, published in London in 1940 and afterwards translated into several languages, has be

One of the first words my 20-month-old son learned was show, as in his favorite, eternally recurring program Barney. That most of what he watches is similarly innocuous doesn’t relieve our discomfort as he points to the television every morning and demands, Show! Show! Not that we deny him his

Maine ModestyI read with interest Of Many Things (10/21), which mentions my native city and tells the story of a golden boy by the name of Ian Crocker. I recently heard another amazing story about this ordinary Olympian. It seems he was working before he left for Australia this summer and mentioned

Scholars Say Vatican’s Published Material on Holocaust InadequateAfter a yearlong study, a commission of three Catholic and three Jewish scholars said that published Vatican material on World War II leaves unanswered many important questions about Pope Pius XII and the Holocaust. In a report m

When, in early August, I had to back out of a social engagement on Long Island because I was heading to Philadelphia to cover the Republican National Convention, neither my prospective host nor any would-be fellow guests were particularly impressed. In fact, some insinuated that there was a more nef