The AP reports more troubling news from the Gulf WASHINGTON ndash Staff members at an agency that oversees offshore drilling accepted tickets to sports events lunches and other gifts from oil and gas companies and used government computers to view pornography according to an Interior Department

The New York Times offered some great coverage of the events and emotions surrounding the final days of St Vincent s Hospital which closed for good this past Friday Staff gathered for a Mass and barbeque and offered each other support And while many mourned the loss they also remembered the goo

While some Catholics may not agree with every point in Nicholas Kristof s latest column in the New York Times it s hard to argue with his words of praise for the many nuns and priests working and living in some of the world s poorest countries These men and women dedicated to humbly serving the p

Most parents are concerned about their children s exposure to objectionable media content which is too-often readily available on TV or the Internet But would more stringent government regulation of SpongeBob or South Park really help Well according 58 percent of parents surveyed in a recently r

I lived for one year in Fort Defiance Ariz on the Navajo reservation about a half hour south of Navajo NM where Sister Marguerite Bartz was killed last November During my time on the reservation I often interacted with a Sister of the Blessed Sacrament who like Bartz strove for peace and j

Over at Catholic Digest Editor in Chief Dan Connors recently wrote a thought-provoking article in which he expresses a frustration with clericalism arguing that the laity needs to look at the possibility of its own complicity in the abuse scandal The crisis and who is to blame is as he says in

When I was a kid I really really wanted an Astronaut Barbie She seemed fully capable of taking on the final frontier despite the impracticality of her shiny pink-and-silver space suit and her not-quite-airtight helmet These days with NASA s manned space program coming to an end the plastic ico

A recent dialogue between Bill Keller the executive editor for The New York Times and Scott Appleby history professor at the University of Notre Dame started out on the wrong foot Their exchange began with comments made by Appleby made during an interview for On Point a program aired on NPR st

From the New York Times The board of St Vincent Catholic Medical Centers voted on Tuesday night to close its flagship hospital in Greenwich Village ending its long struggle to stay afloat despite millions of dollars of debt The exact timing for the closing of St Vincent rsquo s Hospital Manhatt

According to a 2004 study of the lifetime distribution of health care costs the per-capita lifetime expenditure for women is one-third higher than for men 361 200 and 268 700 respectively And that s for those with insurance The study used data from 3 75 million Blue Cross Blue Shield of Mich