Over the last five years I have killed 11 people. My first victim was a slimy lawyer in Seattle; my last was a misguided evangelist in Yakima, Wash. I once killed a 14-year-old boy. And I shot an old fisherman while he was standing up in his boat, then drove a propeller across his body to make sure

Robert E. Kennedy, S.J., is an American Catholic priest and a Zen master (Roshi). Ordained a priest in Japan in 1965, he was installed as a Zen teacher in 1991 and was given the title Roshi in 1997. Kennedy studied Zen with Yamada Roshi in Japan, Maezumi Roshi in Los Angeles and Bernard Glassman Ros

Pro-life Americans suffered a serious defeat with the approval of the RU-486 pill by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration. The pill, which has been used for several years in Europe, allows a woman, under a doctor’s supervision, to abort a fetus up to 49 days after the beginning of her last me

Quality of TranscendenceThe article by John W. O’Malley, S.J., (8/26) exploring the beatification of Pius IX was informative and, to be sure, helped to provide me with contextual information that I did not get elsewhere. In his article, Father O’Malley reflects on the notion of holiness

Did you know that: William Styron (The Confessions of Nat Turner, 1967, Pulitzer Prize; Sophie’s Choice, 1979, American Book Award; et al.) was able to read at age five and was publishing short stories as an adolescent? Agatha Christie’s first mystery, published in 1920, sold only 2,000

Walden Pond is, happily, still intact, despite efforts by developers to destroy its surrounding woods and thereby the pervading spirit of Henry Thoreau, who lived on its banks for a year in the mid-1840’s. During a vacation week spent in the Boston area this past summer, I traveled to the pond

Roman Theologians Say Condom Use O.K. in Certain CasesThe discussion of whether the Catholic Church should tolerate the use of condoms as a lesser evil in fighting the spread of AIDS resurfaced at the Vatican as a result of an article in America (9/23). In that article, Jon D. Fuller, S.J., M.D., an

The United Nations Millennium Summit last month aroused no enthusiasm at Rupert Murdoch’s tabloid, The New York Post. The paper’s pundits were heavily sarcastic. In a Sunday roundup of the events of the first week in September, Linda Stasi claimed that environmental scientists had discov