I'm getting married in nine days, so lately I've been reading a lot of poems about love and marriage. Here's some John Ciardi for everyone to enjoy. . . In Species, Darling by CiardiIn species, darling, consider how the whale,a cousin of a sort, once paddled,as we did yesterday, in summer
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Independence Day is only two days away. Do you think patriotic songs or hymns, such as America the Beautiful, should be sung at Mass? It seems wrong to me, but I'd love to hear what you think
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Writer - director Judd Apatow's funny new comedy, "Knocked Up," about a slacker guy who gets a talented and beautiful woman pregnant after a drunken one night stand and then decides to raise the baby with her, has been getting a lot of press lately. It’s a very funny movie, raunchy
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http://www.breitbart.com/article.php?id=D8OJ4HT80&show_article=1
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Should Catholic campuses be training undergraduates to serve in what the Church has called an unjust war given that there is no such thing as selective conscientious objection? Is this akin to Georgetown or Notre Dame training students to become executioners when the Church has explicitly
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This past weekend I attended the Catholic Peace Fellowship conference in South Bend, Indiana, "Neither Left nor Right: The Heart of Christian Peacemaking." It was a quietly powerful event. It was moving to hear CPF cofounders Jim Forest and Tom Cornell talk about gospel non-violence,
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"The polls report that 98% of Americans believe in God and the remaining 2% are atheists and agnostics -- which leaves not a single percentage point for a seeker"
-- Walker Percy, The Moviegoer
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Here is a copy of the Bishop of Colorado Springs most recent pastoral letter. This letter was read aloud in every church in the Diocese of Colorado Springs this October.
In it, the Bishop claims that you cannot support legal rights for same sex couples (short of actual marriage) and be a
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His voice, along with the voice of a Republican candidate running against a prolife Democrat, is calling Colorado voters at home this election season, urging them to vote against rights for same sex partners, e.g. urging them to vote Republican.CBS News has the story. 
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Tell Me a Story
by Robert Penn Warren
[ A ]Long ago, in Kentucky, I, a boy, stood
By a dirt road, in first dark, and heard
The great geese hoot northward.
I could not see them, there being no moon
And the stars sparse. I heard them.
I did not know what was happening
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I have a conservative Christian friend who is currently teaching English at a secondary school in Korea. Last Sunday, he went to one of the conservative Christian megachurches in Seoul and came back complaining that he couldn't understand a thing. "All they did all day was blare praise and
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Every so often one of my sister's and I have this conversation over the phone. It usually begins with one of us relating a funny story about a run-in at a party or a bar with someone who is pissed off at organized religion (often times, I might add, for good reason). And it usually ends with one
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Most college graduates in their twenties will gladly tell you more than you ever wanted to know about their sex lives. They may even blog about them. Oddly though, there’s still a tremendous amount of shame about getting pregnant and having children, even in one’s mid to late twenties.
I
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In the most recent issue of Commonweal, William Pfaff takes dead aim at the assumption of “progress,” which consciously or unconsciously underlies most American arguments both for and against the war in Iraq. He is right to do so.
When we interpret historical events according to some
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“There can be no deep disappointment where there is not deep love. Yes, I love the Church” -- Martin Luther King Jr. in his Letter from a Birmingham Jail
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This is from the end of Robert Farrar Capon's book, The Supper of the Lamb.
"But second, last and most important, playing it safe is not Divine. We have come to the end. I tell you simply what I believe. Love is the widest, choicest door into the Passion. God saved the world not by
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Last Friday I went to Stations of the Cross in search of something. A darkened sanctuary. A quiet room. A sense of the season. I needed to be still. I needed to stand and kneel, to hear and say, that which is impossible to say alone, "We adore You, O Christ, and we praise You; Because by
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The concerns expressed by the Cardinal Newman Society and others regarding the Catholic character of Catholic colleges and universities in the United Sates is of personal interest to me. For the past four years at Notre Dame, where I'm a senior, the debate about Notre Dame's Catholic character or
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