Ron Hansen has established himself as a significant contemporary American writer with five novels and a collection of stories that have earned him numerous awards and fellowships as well as an endowed chair at Santa Clara University in California He has now collected 14 essays variously published

Carson McCullers described her distinguished novel The Heart is a Lonely Hunter as the story of five isolated lonely people in their search for expression and spiritual integration with something greater than themselves This thematic preoccupation combined with the fact that McCullers lived for a

War is wrong Mahatma Gandhi wrote It has got to go Peace will never come until the great powers courageously decide to disarm themselves Unless the world adopts nonviolence it will spell certain suicide for humanity Gandhi insisted that though history records an endless array of wars with count

This short book advances bone-shattering propositions about the fall of Yugoslavia It argues that U S policymakers and western European leaders knowingly set out to destroy Yugoslavia in the interest of globalized capitalism that the 1999 Rambouillet Peace Agreement was an ambush amounting to o

This short enthusiastic explanation of why and how Catholics should come to know Mary the mother of Jesus through better acquaintance with her types in the Hebrew Scriptures obviously springs from true devotion The author Scott Hahn formerly a Presbyterian minister and now a professor of theolog

An alert for the unwary The Journey to Peace ought not be confused with The Gift of Peace Loyola Press 1997 though both are authored by the late Cardinal Joseph Bernardin of Chicago and were occasioned by the sufferings of his final years Bernardin died Nov 11 1996 The Gift of Peace is Bern

This is the story of a free-fall from remorse shame and self-loathing to peace gratitude and humility and of the parachute that made a safe landing possible The author is a wise and articulate recovering alcoholic nun who acknowledges that Alcoholic Anonymous saved her at a point in her life when

Most Americans who were adults during the Carter administration probably remember Jimmy Carter as a well-intentioned if somewhat inept politician a policy wonk avant la lettre who presided over 20 percent inflation and the Iran hostage debacle Since then of course he has become an admired huma

Traffic, an Academy Awards nominee film directed by Steven Soderbergh, is a rapid-fire saga of the drug trade and of stumbling binational efforts to stop it. It is also a dark-hued morality play. The drug trading and the violence in Traffic take place on both sides of the border crossing between Tij

Egan to Be a Leader at Synod of BishopsPope John Paul II appointed Cardinal Edward Egan of New York to be one of the principal leaders at the Synod of Bishops in October (see page 15 of this issue). As the synod’s general rapporteur, or recording secretary, he will have the very influential ro