The death of cardinal John O’Connor of New York on May 3 marks the end of an era in the American Catholic Church. Without question, he was the most powerful American cardinal of his generation. New York makes a bully pulpit for any archbishop with talent and chutzpah, and Cardinal O’Conn

I’ve already read that, someone answered when I asked whether he had read Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina. What did you think of it? Oh, it was so long ago I can’t rememberit was in college, came the answer. Why not read it again, then? A blank look, as if to imply that it would be a waste

A good deal of the zing has gone out of the race for the presidency now that both John McCain and Bill Bradley have withdrawn. I didn’t realize the intellectual loss until last month, as I listened to Al Gore being interviewed by Jim Lehrer. Lehrer brought up the topic of abortion. Gore chose

Channel surfing a few months ago, I was mildly astonished to come across a rerun of Davey and Goliath, the Eisenhower-era claymation series produced, as I recall, under the auspices of the Lutheran Church. For those of you who weren’t TV-addicted children in the 1960’s, Davey and Goliath

The day after returning from a conference in Washington, D.C., in late February on the persistence of hunger in the United States, I took the subway to the upper west side of Manhattan to hear Mario Cuomo speak on a similar theme. His address was part of a forum called "The Intransigence of Pov

All things are relative, as they say. With the domestic fuel supply dwindling and neither the president nor OPEC budging from the status quo, we have been told to expect at least a $2 per gallon automobile gas price by June. But then, as a local radio commentator remarked recently, just imagine the