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A close friend’s son recently began a prison sentence. When he entered the “correctional institution,” he told the authorities he was a Presbyterian. The following Sunday he asked to be allowed to attend church services. He was told there were no...
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The New York Times isn’t fair. In its all-hands-on-deck drive to implicate the pope in diocesan cover-ups of abusive priests, the Times has relied on a steady stream of documents unearthed or supplied by Jeff Anderson, the nation’s most aggressive...
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John F. Desmond, Kevin Tortorelli, Thomas L. Kuhlman
Not a Reset Button
Thomas L. Kuhlman
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Confronting the twentieth century, Catholicism stood fast. This was its mission: church as bulwark against the disorders afflicting the age.
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History & Mystery: John C. Cavadini reviews the second volume of Benedict XVI's Jesus of Nazareth
Ratzinger at Vatican II, by John Wilkins
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Sometimes, when talking to younger audiences, the theologian Lisa Sowle Cahill will describe herself as a “relic” of the distant and benighted era before the Second Vatican Council.
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On the Wednesday after Easter, nine hundred Notre Dame students serenely walked into the DeBartolo Performing Arts Center to see a debate between Christopher Hitchens and Dinesh D’Souza. “Is Religion the Problem?” was the question. About two hours...
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If you work in bioethics, are of a certain age, and have a degree from the University of Virginia, colleagues are likely to assume you studied with James Childress, the legendary teacher who co-authored Principles of Biomedical Ethics, a...
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Over the past two decades, few writers have charmed as many critics and readers as the British novelist Ian McEwan.
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I bought my first rosary in 1960. It was plastic and pink, and it cost a dime. Our Catholic school had mandated that all first-graders purchase a rosary from the principal’s office on a certain day. But when that day came, only three of us arrived...
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When the German journalist Peter Sewald recently asked Pope Benedict XVI whether the Catholic Church was “opposed in principle to the use of condoms,” the pope replied that under some circumstances the use of a condom could be a “first step” toward...
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In the riots that swept Islamic society last winter, reaction to the publication of cartoons insulting the Prophet Mohammed, the world glimpsed evidence of a clash between cultures—but not in the sense of the “clash of civilizations” that Samuel...
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This summer witnessed the publication of Caritas in veritate, Pope Benedict XVI's long-awaited encyclical on economics.
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Stanley Hauerwas is the most immediately likable bombthrower I have ever met. I first encountered him and his essays during that part of the 1970s I spent in the newly hatched field of bioethics.
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Photo: © eugene
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The Catholic Church is strenuously—some would say obsessively—opposed to the legalization of same-sex marriage. How persuasively is the church making its case? Is the church right to emphasize the issue in the uncompromising way some of its most...
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Let’s not waste a minute: What is a crisis? What is liberal Catholicism?
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Why are the most unlikely people, including myself, suddenly talking about God? Who would have expected theology to rear its head once more in the technocratic twenty-first century, almost as surprisingly as some mass revival of Zoroastrianism?
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We’re still debating whether what we’re doing in Libya can rightly be described as war, though bombs dropped amid an “intervention” are just as deadly. But where’s the debate over whether it’s fair or accurate to assert that Republicans in Congress...
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First of all, I think we might imagine today’s event as a three-hour rebuttal to Governor Jesse Ventura and his claim that participants in organized religion are weak-minded. I wish he were here with us today. I think he might come to realize that...
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“What is man, that thou art mindful of him? And the son of man, that thou visitest him?” So asked the psalmist three thousand years ago. The question is still with us and as urgent as ever: What are we?
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In the past nine years, the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, have been invoked, distorted, and exploited to serve a variety of political and ideological agendas. But no such effort has been quite as shameful as the current campaign against...
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One of Barack Obama's great attractions as a presidential candidate was his sensitivity to the feelings and intellectual concerns of religious believers. That is why it is so remarkable that he utterly botched the admittedly difficult question of...
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Around these parts, the “Year of the Priest” has been as much of a nonevent as the opening of Al Capone’s vault or spending New Year’s Eve with the Y2K bug. Although Pope Benedict XVI officially began the observance last June, it wasn’t until eight...
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While I took Lent and Easter more seriously than ever this year—in terms of prayer, Scriptural reading, reflection, and discipline—I didn’t go to Mass. In fact, I haven’t been since Christmas.
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Charles Taylor’s remarkable book A Secular Age achieves something quite different from what other writers on secularization have accomplished.
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Catholic social teaching, whether promulgated by Ambrose of Milan in the fourth century or Benedict XVI in the twenty-first, has always been contextual. The themes emphasized, although consistent in their fundamental doctrinal commitments, have...
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It’s in vogue to ask what the Internet is doing to our brains. Will constant exposure to technology destroy human memory and attention span? Will it turn us into machines who can take in massive amounts of information over the course of a day but...
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I’d like to begin with the proposition error has no rights. That is a proposition I take to be indisputable. It’s the beginning of a major syllogism. And it is the major syllogism that sustained religious persecution from about 320 a.d. into the...
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Cosmopolitanism Ethics in a World of Strangers Kwame Anthony Appiah Norton, $23.95, 196 pp.
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Twenty-one years after German reunification, Communist East Germany—or the German Democratic Republic, as it officially and inaccurately called itself—has receded like a bad dream.
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I have been working for MTV Networks for fifteen years and have written several books about rock ’n’ roll. I never expected to find the church trampling in my vineyard.
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While many Americans know Oxford professor and evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins for The Selfish Gene, the 1976 science bestseller that portrayed all life as a struggle to propagate DNA, they may be less familiar with his other identity as a...
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Margaret O'Brien Steinfels
Introduction
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I’ve changed my mind about the outcry against sex-selective abortion. Since the 1980s, when the issue emerged here in India and neighboring China, I’ve been skeptical of feminist objections to aborting baby girls on the basis of their sex.
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Condemnation of religion has become the fashion of the day. Richard Dawkins, Samuel Harris, David Dennett, and, most lately, the elegantly irascible Christopher Hitchens have hit the bestseller lists with screeds against faith.
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In September 1960, John F. Kennedy gave one of the most memorable speeches of his political career to the Greater Houston Ministerial Association. Kennedy addressed this group because Protestants, especially evangelical Protestants, were deeply...
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The recent reports of Mother Teresa’s long dark night made more news than they should have, I thought. Then I had second thoughts: this might lead to a serious discussion of faith and certainty, which are not at all the same thing. There were a few...
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The democratic uprising that brought down the Mubarak dictatorship in Egypt stands as one of the most dramatic expressions of “people power” in history. The people’s victory in Egypt was preceded by the downfall of the Ben Ali regime in Tunisia and...
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There has been an interesting recent debate about faith and doubt, religious belief and atheism.
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What follows is an edited version of remarks by political philosopher William Galston made to a colloquium sponsored by Commonweal on "Catholic Social Thought and Liberal Pluralism." The colloquium is part of a project, titled "American Catholics...
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Books by people who see religion as a profound misunderstanding or dangerous delusion have proliferated recently. The God Delusion by Richard Dawkins has been on the New York Times best-seller list for weeks. Sam Harris’s The End of Faith...
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In 1949, Karl Jaspers introduced the notion of an “axial age” to describe a few centuries around the middle of the first millennium B.C. when great spiritual masters planted the seeds of the great world faiths.
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John Rawls is widely recognized as the most important American political philosopher since the mid-century. His book A Theory of Justice (Harvard University Press, 1971) redefined its discipline and, in so doing, aroused controversy on every side.
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In a recent speech commemorating the end of World War II, President George W. Bush dusted off a shopworn bit of far-right GOP dogma. He accused President Franklin D. Roosevelt of making a corrupt deal with Stalin at the Yalta Conference in 1945,...
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For years now, Christian culture warriors such as Richard John Neuhaus and James Dobson have been railing against the secularists who want to repress religion and eradicate the effect of religious beliefs on public morality and law.
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With the advent of a new millennium, what some have called “The American Century” officially came to an end seven years ago.
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The best-selling atheistic manifestoes by Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, and Christopher Hitchens are now in the paperback phase of their remarkable cultural tour.
