Last month students in my class on women and Catholicism spent an evening at a Catholic Worker House in South Bend Ind We prepared a meal shared it with the guests and listened to an after-dinner talk by Margaret Pfeil a staff member at the house and my colleague at Notre Dame Pfeil spoke abou
American Catholics have persisted in viewing both U S secular and church history as primarily a movement of Northern European people and institutions westward across the barren plains But the deeper truth that inexorably is catching up with us is that it is also increasingly the history of movem
I plan to make this book required reading for my first-year students at Loyola University Chicago rsquo s Stritch School of Medicine I also would highly recommend it to anyone facing serious illness And frankly that rsquo s all of us It is a marvelous book that will change those who read it and
Hope involves wishing and waiting for something that has a chance of becoming a reality The Scripture readings for the Second Sunday of Advent enable us to see what is important and distinctive in the biblical understanding of hope God is the origin ground and goal of hope They also remind us th
When I was a grumpy teenager in high school, I retreated one Advent to the calm of our cellar and allowed only my sister to visit for help. We had a project. It had been years since we had set up the “Christmas platform”; but that year we had a new baby, something of such cosmic signific
Sentencing SaddamWhen a court in Baghdad found Saddam Hussein guilty of crimes against humanity and sentenced him to death by hanging, President George W. Bush hailed the verdict as a milestone in the Iraqi people’s efforts to replace the rule of a tyrant with the rule of law and a vindication
The 700-mile fence rising between the United States and Mexico stands as a dramatic symbol of the separation between a rich nation and a poor one. But it also serves as a symbol of our failed immigration policies. The wall and other restrictionist efforts are painful reminders of the misguided direc