Perhaps I should have known from the title that Robert Morgan rsquo s new novel is about faith Before I could reflect on the title and try to puzzle out a reference point for it I was caught up in the story Morgan is like that You leaf through a page or two and suddenly the narrative has swept y

Eudora Welty, who died on July 23 at the age of 92, will remain forever for me a Southern gentlewoman who honed her writing skills to do her life’s work: create lasting literature. She lived in Mississippi throughout the era of the civil rights movement, seemingly apart from the fray. But she

I knew the hate would be coming, but not with such ferocity, such immediacy and such prominence. Time magazine’s specially rushed issue portraying the World Trade Center atrocity ran one opinion piece, on its last written page. It was Lance Morrow’s Case for Rage and Retribution. But it

The bitter grievances that many in the poor nations have against the rich nations produced two explosions last month, one actual and one figurative. The terrorist attacks on Sept. 11 were as real as death. The quarrels that nearly blew up the United Nations Conference on Racism amounted to a symboli

Young adult Catholics are legion. Statistical surveys indicate as much. Yet when I step over the threshold of my parish church, I see very few of my peers.

These recent weeks I have been musing dreamlike over my seven Jesuit decades. Time and again I was struck by a line from that ever so popular hymn Amazing Grace. Eight monosyllables: ’Tis grace hath brought me safe thus far. Grace. Not some vague abstraction. Rather, God’s ceaseless pres

A Deeper LookIn my search for meaning and the words to express it, Cardinal Avery Dulles provides a profound perspective. His reflections on the Shoah (9/17) apply equally to the incineration and crushing of over 6,000 people on Sept. 11. Following Cardinal Dulles’s sage advice, I have asked m

In the first years of the 20th century Alois Alzheimer a German neurologist cared for a middle-aged woman with a marked personality change characterized by bizarre behavior and memory loss This woman died about five years after he first met her years characterized by an inexorable decline to a

Combining archetypal psychology ecclesiology and ethics Eugene Kennedy in his latest book The Unhealed Wound sets out a disturbing vision of church malaise rooted in the distorted transference of sexual energy into power and manipulation Kennedy uses the analogy of the wounded Grail King of the

When Virginia Woolf published Mrs Dalloway in 1925 her fourth novel she set out to demonstrate what she thought was needed in modern fiction an examination of the interior of her characters the stream of consciousness that holds each of us together from moment to moment What did not interest