Local and international observers quote a popular saying to characterize the current postelection crisis in Kenya: “When two elephants fight, the grass suffers.” For us in Kenya this is not just a quaint figure of speech. It aptly describes the catastrophe that has rocked the country sin

Barack Obama has a problem He has based his campaign on moving past the stale arguments of the past 20 years when the Bush Clinton families have taken turns in the White House America s late Roman empire problem But last week the campaign harkened back to an even earlier time the iden

The political news from Iowa and New Hampshire has undercut the conventional wisdom about our present political culture. The surprisingly decisive victory in Iowa of Barack Obama, an African-American candidate campaigning in a predominantly white state, damaged the image of Hillary Clinton as the in

There has been a great deal of anecdotal speculation about religious proclivities and spiritual seeking among so-called Generation X the children of the baby boomers Robert Wuthnow a professor of sociology and director of the Center for the Study of American Religion at Princeton University take

Identifying immigrants, violence against women, the rise of Hugo Chavez

On Sept. 13, 1983, Peter-Hans Kolvenbach was elected 29th superior general. He retired in 2008.

In the August 13-20 edition of America, Father Andrew Greeley writes about American Catholics Today, a recent sociological study that seeks to gauge what elements of Catholicism are most important to people in the pews. For more than three quarters of respondents, helping the poor, the Resurrection, the sacraments and Mary were very important. At the bottom of the list were abortion, teaching authority, death penalty and celibate male clergy, Father Greeley writes. He agreed to discuss his article with America by email.

What does this study say about what you have called the "Catholic imagination?

From 2006, a survey of the complicated political picture in Venezuela, Nicaragua and elsewhere

The most obvious lesson of the 2006 elections, in which the Democratic Party became the majority party in both houses of Congress, is that the election was a referendum on the leadership of President George W. Bush. The president was quick to accept the verdict of the voters, announcing the followin

For me, a Catholic bishop, the past four years have been Dickensian—the best of times and the worst of times. How they have been the worst of times hardly needs explanation, but the growing realization that they have also been the best of times has come to me as an ever-deepening conviction an