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

As this issue goes to press, we are a little over three weeks removed from the day terror struck. It has been a time of intense and widespread prayer on both small and grand scales. We hear people constantly talking about faith, about the comfort they find knowing that God hears. Such was a conversa

Pope’s Visit Produces Ecumenical Firsts Two ecumenical firsts occurred when Pope John Paul II visited Armenia at the invitation of the Armenian Apostolic Church, an ancient and independent Oriental Orthodox church that in recent years has improved its relations with the Vatican. He stayed at t

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

Sept. 11, 2001, drove preachers of the Good News to tackle the classic questions of theodicy.