Though often labeled a modern-day Thoreau Wendell Berry is perhaps more akin to a biblical prophet a lone voice crying not in the wilderness but from his own farm Like Isaiah and Amos Berry is able to discern the embedded patterns of corruption and injustice in a culture of haves and have-nots

When we were in the seminary our economics professor Ed Roche God be good to him told us one day that his classmates were getting old ldquo I say to them when you start complaining about the young guys it rsquo s proof you rsquo re getting old rdquo Ironically his classmates in those days

By this point in his illustrious career Garry Wills the most celebrated Catholic intellectual in the United States must find it increasingly burdensome to be ldquo Garry Wills rdquo Not only the most celebrated but perhaps the most ubiquitous as well This spiritual autobiography which doub

Pope Urges World to Address Underlying Causes’ of TerrorismAt a special general audience marking the anniversary of the terrorist attacks in the United States on Sept. 11, 2001, Pope John Paul II said it was necessary and urgent to address the global injustices that created the conditions for

It had to happen. Just as the shoemaker’s children go barefoot and the carpenter’s children live under a leaky roof, I knew this day would come. I am a church worker whose daughter has stopped going to church. My daughters have grown up with the church as their second home, because it wa

Karl Rahner, S.J., (1904-84) and Hans Urs von Balthasar (1905-88), are in my estimation the two most influential Catholic theologians of the 20th century. Rahner, a German Jesuit priest profoundly influenced by the Spiritual Exercises of St. Ignatius Loyola, spent his life primarily as a teacher and

Before my sister’s son, Charles, was born four years ago, I found it difficult to understand why people found their children’s comments so amusing. Certainly I had friends and relatives with young and often precocious children, but when they repeated their supposedly hilarious comments t

Who can tell me what I can do with my own body? The church? “Society”? The Bible? Playboy? A catechist? “Sex and the City”? With the high school students I teach, only one answer works: the objective facts and honest reasoning. Only the objective facts decide which of those c

To explain how my experience as a parent has been a spiritual path, I have to begin seven years before my first child was born. At age 22, I was feeling more lost in my life than I’ve ever been before or since. My life was devoid of meaning and more than grim. In my lowest moment I latched ont