Gun control is about the defense of life.

How a new generation of theologians is reshaping the church.

There is a surefire cure for pride, however, and it is as simple as a reminder of some of the moments when we got things just a little wrong. Or a lot wrong.

From the beginning of Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish New Year, until the end of Yom Kippur (the Day of Atonement), Jews around the world engage in an intense annual period of repentance.

A plenary council or regional synod may not have been good ideas anyway. But more and more, the attitude appears to be that the church’s business is the bishops’ business and no one else’s; openness and a desire to involve others in church affairs seem to have become passé. It is worth considering why.

At his 80th birthday party last year, celebrated with dozens of friends in the garden of his home in northwestern Connecticut, Isaac Stern asked me to sit next to him at dinner. Rarely have I felt so honored. His luminous personality represented to me the perfect combination of a monumentally succes