With his latest novel Roddy Doyle the laureate of Dublin rsquo s present quot lower middle classes quot moves down the social ladder a notch or two and a century back in time His sympathy remains however clearly with the proles and in Henry Smart he has found his ideal protagoniststreet-sma

Praying on a New York City subway train? Those who view New York as chaos incarnate might consider such an undertaking impossible. In fact, though, many commuters find some of the very conditions of subway travel to be ideal for prayer. If you are lucky enough to have a seat, the fixed position is i

President Clinton’s State of the Union address on Jan. 27 left Republicans and Democrats in agreement on at least two points: The speech was very long, and its delivery was a great performance. It was bound to be a long speech, because in pursuit of his two main purposes Mr. Clinton had a lot

'Even the monsters Hitler or Stalin are fallen sinners, and we cry and pray for them.' In recent months, while a war-time pontiff’s attitudes toward mid-century European totalitarianism became a subject of written discussion (as in Hitler’s Pope and the response to it by reviewer

Suppression of religious minorities and its nuclear blasts have made India visible to the world.

The demonstrationunprecedented since the Vietnam war erathat convulsed normally laid-back Seattle late last fall had two results. It brought the work of the World Trade Organization to a halt, and it reintroduced the issue of globalization to the American political scene. Labor had unsuccessfully fo

The announcement in London that 45-year-old Cherie Blair, wife of the British prime minister, is expecting her fourth child produced the expected acres of newspaper column inches. But one historic angle of the story was completely ignored by journalists. For the first time ever a British prime minis

'A time to offend and be offended.' There were two groups conspicuously absent from the State of the Union Address, 2000. The first was nine Supreme Court justices. Our most judicious body seems to have had a case of the collective flu. The other absent group was third-trimester unborn human

Not long ago I came across an article about one Mr. Newton Minow, the former chairman of the Federal Communications Commission who famously described television in the 1960’s as "a vast wasteland." Doubtless it would have surprised Mr. Minow that his phrase still sums up the current

Pope Plans to Canonize Blessed Katharine DrexelPope John Paul II plans to canonize Blessed Katharine Drexel (1859-1955), the U.S. heiress who dedicated her life to defending and educating African Americans and Native Americans. During a meeting with the Congregation for Sainthood Causes on Jan. 27,