Magazine

For a few days in early February, Americans seemed surprised to discover that the entertainment industry peddles raunchy behavior over the public airwaves to a vast and impressionable audience. The Super Bowl halftime debacle, or, more to the point, the outrage the debacle inspired, prompted more th

Introduction by James Martin, associate editor of America.

"I couldn’t find anyone else to go—it was too close to Christmas.” But the matter was urgent: a death row prisoner was to be executed in two weeks, and he was asking for spiritual guidance. So Camille D’Arienzo, a Sister of Mercy from Brooklyn, made the journey with a pr

Man bites dog is news. So is the decline of religion. Dog bites man is continuity. So too the persistence of religion. That’s not news. Thus the media are fascinated by allegations of religious decline in Europe, especially because the remnants of modernity expect, even demand, the decline of

Last September, the ministerial meeting of the World Trade Organization in Cancún, Mexico, failed. The agreed-upon agenda was overpowered by topics that favored the United States, Europe and Japan. The issues of state procurements, foreign investment, intellectual property and competition were give

Compassionate Critic

Thanks to Richard R. Gaillardetz for the kind things he said about me and others in Do We Need a New(er) Apologetics? (2/2). I am pleased that he can appreciate the love and passion of someone’s work, even as he disagrees with that person’s methods. I would

My mother went under the knife last summer, sacrificing her left breast to the unkind god of cancer. The uncontrolled dividing by abnormal cells, which raised a tightened, angry welt on her breast that her doctor had recommended watching for over a year, turned out to be an aggressive tumor. After t