It's graduation season at the nation's colleges and universities, so it must be time for another round of Catholic Commencement Controversy. Here in New England this year, the most prominent entry thus far features the region's most prominent Catholic school and bishop: Boston College and
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The Transform Now Plowshares--- Greg Boertje-Obed, Sr. Megan Rice and Michael Walli---were found guilty Wednesday on two felony charges for their July 28, 2012 break-in at and protest at the Y-12 National Security Complex in Oak Ridge, the nation's storehouse for bomb-grade uranium.
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Worcester, Massachusetts, Bishop Robert McManus was arrested Saturday night at his family's vacation home in Naragansett, Rhode Island, on charges of drunken driving, leaving the scene of an accident, and refusing a chemical test.
"I made a terrible error in judgment by driving after having
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Today for the first time since the Boston Marathon bombings I walked past the Arredondos' house. On the poles in the postage stamp-sized backyard, the flags (one American, one Veterans for Peace) were at half-mast, waving gently in the breeze above a "War Is Not The Answer" sign.
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In many ways the Boston Marathon on Patriots’ Day---preceded by the reenactment of Paul Revere's Ride and the Battles of Lexington and Concord that launched the American Revolution, along side the Boston Red Sox playing major league baseball’s only morning game of the year at nearby Fenway Park
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How did you celebrate Easter this year?
Our parish's vigil Mass began in the entryway of the church, with the doors open. Since the church is on a main avenue, we start with the sounds of the city all around us, a reminder that the first Easter also took part amid the bustle and distractions
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In many ways, Barack Obama's second inaugural speech was utterly characteristic: he began with the Declaration of Independence, which conservatives have worked mightily over the past four years to put to the service of their own ideology and agenda...and then used it as the keystone on which to
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It's the first Sunday of Advent. In our house that means the Christmas music has started. From now through Epiphany, for hours each day, via cassette tapes, compact discs and mp3 files, Christmas music will resound.
A New England Christmas and Feliz Navidad in Santa Fe. Handel's Messiah in
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What do you do after winning four Olympic gold medals?
If you're U.S. swimmer Missy Franklin, you go home to Colorado for your last chance to swim with your high school team. Franklin's a senior at Regis Jesuit High School in Aurora, and will---as she did last winter---swim an abbreviated
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In last Friday's edition of the Forum of Fargo-Moorhead*, reporter Erik Burgess advanced the story of Lennon Cihak, the Barnesville MN teenager denied the sacrament of confirmation by his pastor, Fr. Gary LaMoine of Assumption Parish, for Cihak's public support of same-sex civil marriage. Burgess
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Assumption Church is in Barnesville, Minnesota, a town about 30 minutes southeast on I-94 from Fargo, North Dakota. Fr. Gary LaMoine is the pastor at Assumption who (apparently) has decided that supporting same-sex marriage is grounds for being denied the sacrament of confirmation.
"If
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Personally, I blame CCHD.
Okay, that's an overstatement. The Catholic Campaign for Human Development is not solely---or even primarily---responsible for the fact Pres. Obama won re-election, or that the Republican party is only just now waking up (it is to be hoped) to the fact that it doesn't
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Massachusetts voters narrowly (51%-49%) rejected a referendum question that would have legalized physician-assisted suicide. Opponents of Question 2 raised more money ($2.6 million v. $700,000), built a broader coalition and made persuasive arguments against physician-assisted suicide in general
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Over the weekend there were several requests for a thread about Sen. McGovern who died yesterday at the age of 90, shortly after entering hospice care in Sioux Falls, South Dakota. This post can serve as one.
Wikipedia has what seems to be a decent overview of Sen. McGovern's life and career
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Most of the debate in Catholic circles about Republican vice-presidential candidate Paul Ryan has taken place in the arenas of philosophy (e.g., can Ryan claim both Ayn Rand and Catholic social teaching as major influences on his thinking?) and policy (e.g., are Ryan's plans to "end Medicare
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Next month, voters in Massachusetts will decide whether to approve Question #2, "allowing a physician licensed in Massachusetts to prescribe medication, at the request of a terminally-ill patient meeting certain conditions, to end that person’s life".
With all the discussion here at
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As part of the lead-up to Frontline's new documentary, The Choice 2012, they've asked several close observers and biographers of Barack Obama and Mitt Romney to engage in what amounts to an online version of a roundtable discussion about the two men and the formative experiences of their lives.
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It's been a rough year for Republican VP nominee Paul Ryan in his dealings with the Jesuits. (Esquire's Charlie Pierce puts it better---and more colorfully---here.)
The latest episode comes courtesy of Vincent Miller in America's fine group blog, "In All Things". Miller listened to
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For many musicians, New Orleans is as close to sacred ground as you can get in these United States.
New Orleans holds Congo Square, the only place in the antebellum South where slaves could and did regularly gather to drum and to dance.
New Orleans produced Louis Armstong, whose use of the
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It's far from conclusive, but there's growing evidence that the Affordable Care Act could lead to a significant reduction in the number of abortions performed in the United States. (If true, it also follows that repealing the Affordable Care Act would result in more, not fewer, abortions than
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As Bruce Springsteen begins the 2nd North American leg of his "Wrecking Ball" tour, it's hard to think of an analog for the artistic, cultural and political project in which he's engaged. This isn't a group of musicians touring on behalf of a cause (e.g., the Amnesty International
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With the calm, understated, diplomatic tone for which he is so widely known (I kid), Esquire's Charlie Pierce picks up on an Eli Lake story in The Daily Beast about how Elliott Abrams is one of Paul Ryan's foreign policy tutors, and observes:
"Maybe, during a break at his next foreign-
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Everywhere I go lay Catholics are concelebrating at Sunday Mass.
I've noticed it for years now. I notice it more in the summer when, for various reasons, we're often at a different parish and/or in a different part of the country. By now I've noticed it in so many different kinds of parishes
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"When I moved to Canada in 2008, I was a die-hard conservative Republican. So when I found out that we were going to be covered by Canada’s Universal Health Care, I was somewhat disgusted. This meant we couldn’t choose our own health coverage, or even opt out if we wanted too. It also
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Someday the national political conversation will shift away from Mitt Romney's "retroactive retirement" from Bain Capital and back to the federal budget. When it does, a subset of that conversation will be about the political, philosophical and theological influences on the central
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Spoken word artist Taylor Mali’s poem, “I’ll Fight You For The Library” is a battle-in-four-letters between a veteran teacher and an administrator over whether the school’s library will be available for the teacher’s students to conduct research for an assignment...or whether it will
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In the 40 years since Ray Charles first recorded "America the Beautiful" (on his album, Message from the People), it has become perhaps the best-loved and most widely known version of Katherine Lee Bates' great patriotic hymn. That's not surprising. In addition to his talents as a
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The internet is a wild and wonder-filled place. This video comes to us courtesy of the combined talents of the Brooklyn Tabernacle Choir and Msgr. Charles Pope, pastor of Holy Comforter-St. Cyprian Church in Washington, DC. It's an uplifting and almost unimaginably eclectic combination of
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It is a peculiarity of the current moment in American politics that the Supreme Court has six Catholic and three Jewish justices when Catholics and Jews make up only 22% and 3% respectively of the US population. (Justice John Paul Stevens, who retired in 2010, was the last remaining Protestant on
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It's been a great and momentous week for the Southern Baptist Convention. First Richard Land, the powerful chairman of the denomination's Ethics & Religious Liberty Commission joined an Evangelical Immigration Table press conference calling for comprehensive immigration reform that, among
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Well, only if the block is virtual not physical. As for being new, I've been hanging around in the comments section for at least a couple of years. And nobody's called me a kid in years...decades actually.
Regardless, thanks to the Commonweal editors for inviting me to post occasionally &
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