The New York Times has as much enthusiasm for President Bush as Mr. Creakle, the headmaster of Salem House, had for that wholly unpromising schoolboy, David Copperfield. The Times’s editorials regularly register their disfavor with Mr. Bush’s domestic and foreign policies. What about the

The issues confronting the church in our time are many. I have chosen three of them, well aware that this choice is doubtless both biased and incomplete. And I am also certainly under the influence of the situation in northern Europe, where the churches are exposed to the eroding influence of secula

Cardinal Danneels, did you plan this intervention at the May consistory beforehand? No. At synods, I usually wait about a week before I speak. First I listen. I feel the temperature. I listen to what has been said, what has not been said, and what I think needs to be said at that point. Some bi

The word survivor suggests someone who has emerged alive from a plane crash or a natural disaster. But the word can also refer to the loved ones of murder victims, and this was the sense in which it was used at a four-day conference in early June at Boston College. Sponsored jointly by the college a

The working document for next October’s international synod of bishops is now being circulated. The text, titled The Bishop: Servant of the Gospel of Jesus Christ for the Hope of the World, runs to 120 pages and has 229 footnotes. Significantly, the pope’s groundbreaking encyclical on Ch

In his brief foreword to Ghislain Lafont rsquo s Imagining the Catholic Church Archbishop Rembert Weakland O S B calls attention to something that makes Lafont rsquo s voice different from other voices speaking today about the church Father Lafont does not think in words sentences and paragrap

quot The world is on the verge of new and great changes Mr Scrooge You agree quot --Jacob Marley upon meeting Ebenezer Scrooge in George Minter rsquo s 1951 film A Christmas Carol The above epigraph alluding to the social economic cultural and political upheaval of the Industrial Revolutio

Defending human rights pays off not only in terms of justice but also in ways that can include greater economic growth a more protected environment better public health and a generally less violent world Such is the basic theme of this important book Written by someone who knows the human right