The Church’s Lenten disciplines have often been seen in terms of bodily divestment: giving up food, giving up passions, giving away money. Such attention is rightly meant to turn us to God. But we should beware of giving up, in the process, the table, around which our bodily life and needs find . . . . Continue Reading »
It is very much in the air now, with a deep hope on one side and a grim resignation on the other, that the holding in Roe v. Wade will not survive this year. Conservatives seem sure that something decisive is about to happen because they have helped to put on the Court the judges who can . . . . Continue Reading »
I have always felt the need to justify not only my desire for basic human goods, such as affection and employment, but my very existence. My childhood was not to blame, as my parents ensured that I had everything to help me succeed professionally and thrive as a human being. I had no shortage of . . . . Continue Reading »
It was at this point, at the very end of the Church year, inspired by a tremulous confidence and the irresistible attraction of first love, that I established the habit of going to daily Mass. Every day at noon when the bells of St. Mary’s were ringing out the Angelus over New Haven, I drove into . . . . Continue Reading »
Plutarch tells us that Gaius Gracchus (154–121 b.c.) devoted his life to civic reform, while Cato the Younger (95–46 b.c.) would “rather compete in valor with the best, than in wealth with the richest or the most covetous in love of money.” Impressive in both cases, no doubt, but what are . . . . Continue Reading »
Islam,” Mustafa Akyol writes in his latest book, “is not the powerful, creative, sophisticated, beautiful civilization that it once was.” Instead, Akyol argues in Reopening Muslim Minds, Islam is in a crisis, a crisis that cannot simply be blamed on Western colonialism or imperialism. . . . . Continue Reading »
We Jews know death. Leaf through the Talmud, that treasure trove of rabbinic wisdom, lore, and law, and you’ll find the grim reaper loafing about on every other page, inspiring scores of intricate debates about what precisely we must do when faced with the Great Unfathomable. Judaism gives us no . . . . Continue Reading »
It was the beach house that got to me this time. When the priest abuse scandals broke in early 2002, inaugurating what Richard John Neuhaus called our “Long Lent,” I had been ordained for less than two years. My initial reaction was shock and anger. Even after the U.S. bishops had promised in . . . . Continue Reading »
Small wars, the kind that pit a superpower against an apparently overmatched enemy, are easy to slip into and can be hard to get out of. But it need not always be so. The British in their imperial magnificence at the turn of the twentieth century fought wars against Islamic fanatics on the northwest . . . . Continue Reading »
For many of today’s students, the ideas of Adorno, Foucault, Barthes, and the rest are practically indigestible; the long hours required to understand these thinkers are drudgery. But for a brief period in the twentieth century, the act of reading them was downright religious, the air in the . . . . Continue Reading »
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