Not long ago I heard several chaplains of a major U S children rsquo s hospital speak on ldquo spirituality and medicine rdquo After a review of recent scientific studies linking prayer faith and physical health one of the speakers gasped ldquo When I hear such exciting news all I can say

Yann Martel won Britain rsquo s most prestigious literary award the Man Booker Prize for Life of Pi a book that reinvents the lost-at-sea novel in quite striking terms Martel himself has been storm-tossed in a controversy about whether he inappropriately employed the premise of a 1981 story by M

In 1970 at the age of 56 Alec Guinness by then one of the best-known character actors in the world sat for a formal portrait Michael Noakes the artist recognized the overwhelming challenge of the task ldquo How does one paint what lies beneath the surface of the skin rdquo asks biographer

Ross Terrill rsquo s argument goes something like this China is not a modern state It has been unable to escape its heritage of empire and authoritarian political systems The revolution against the Qing Manchu dynasty in 1911 and the Communist seizure of power in 1949 reinforced these premodern

Those of us who knew Paul Dinter as the Catholic chaplain at Columbia University in the 1970 rsquo s and 80 rsquo s were presented with a personable intellectually rigorous and obviously virtuous priest in a crisp Roman collar and well-tailored black suit It was not that he was an unblinking spear

Around Jesus rsquo time roughly from 20 B C to A D 70 Jews especially in Jerusalem developed the practice of a two-stage burial The corpse would first be laid out on a shelf cut into the wall of a burial cave and allowed to decompose Then a year later the bones would be gathered up and pl