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

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

The pages of America have lately been filled with articles on the question of liturgical translations. Bishop Donald W. Trautman, former chairman of the N.C.C.B Committee on Liturgy, and Cardinal Jorge A. Medina, head of the Congregation for Divine Worship and the Discipline of the Sacraments, have

As an apostolic religious sister formed in the post-Vatican II style of religious life, I live my vowed life while engaged quite actively in the world rather than apart from it. Gone are the days of the separation of contemplative sisters by a cloister, which protected us from the temptations that p

Word and ImageIt’s laudable thatwith everything else the Rev. Andrew M. Greeley is able to accomplishhe keeps up with the times and what is going on in the world around him (9/16). Father Greeley has such vital enthusiasm. Would that all of us noticed as well the beautiful skies in the photos