At first reading I thought Ronald Hill rsquo s tack toward poverty somewhat puzzling coming from someone whose specialty is social science and public policy I had expected many more statistical tables and analytic categories Basically through a compilation of data from those he interviewed and

Slowly over the past 25 years in the United States the old belief in free will has been replaced by a pseudo-scientific belief in determinism Faulty genes bad brain chemistry neurotransmitters gone bonkersthese are some of our postmodern excuses In American Exorcism however Michael Cuneo does

One of the most striking attributes of Harvard Divinity School professor and theologian Harvey Cox has been timeliness His first book The Secular City published in 1965 proclaimed the collapse of traditional religion to be a main hallmark of our era It generated controversy sold nearly a millio

Samuel Taylor Coleridge 1772-1834 believed that one of the great miseries of his time was that it recognized no medium between Literal and Metaphorical it ignored the symbolic Too many of his age still followed the lead of 18th-century writers philosophers who distrusted mystery and poets who d

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

In early April, the upper house of the Dutch Parliament voted to legalize what has been a legally tolerated practice for the last two decades: euthanasia and physician assisted suicide (PAS). Over the last decades Holland has moved to a more open and accepted practice of euthanasia and PAS by develo

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.