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Eve Tushnet, Luke Timothy Johnson
Scripture & Experience
Luke Timothy Johnson
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Last year I got a call from an administrator at a Midwestern seminary with a reputation for its “take no prisoners” conservative theology. He had permission to conduct a series of seminars on hot-button issues like abortion, stem-cell research, and...
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Conservative Catholics complain that too many liberal Catholics instinctively greet every statement from the Vatican with suspicion, skepticism, or derision. It’s a fair point. The motives and judgment of those who appear unthinkingly hostile to all...
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The Obama administration has rejected appeals to exempt religious-affiliated institutions, such as hospitals and universities, from the mandate issued by the Department of Health and Human Services requiring all health-insurance policies to include...
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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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Forty years ago, most Americans considered homosexual activity an abomination and homosexual marriage an impossibility. Now a wide range of U.S. and Canadian citizens are debating whether homosexual marriage may be an idea whose time has come.
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I met the theologian Fr. James Alison in the blogosphere. I’d written a post presenting his fascinating suggestion that Benedict XVI was slowly preparing the way for a change in church teaching concerning homosexuality.
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The Catholic Church in the United States owes its sister church in Ireland a great deal. It was the Irish who first brought our faith to these shores in great numbers, providing the nascent American church not merely with faithful lay Catholics in...
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In his last years as head of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith and from the beginning of his papacy, Pope Benedict has demonstrated a real understanding of the nature and scope of the clergy sexual-abuse crisis.
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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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Margaret O'Brien Steinfels
The vote on California’s Proposition 8 in the November election shocked and dismayed the gay community—and surprised others who thought it was a shoo-in vote for the liberal state.
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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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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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There has been a lot of loose talk about the current crisis facing the Catholic Church and the Vatican in particular.
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The recent instruction from the Congregation for Catholic Education regarding the ordination of homosexuals suggests to me that seminaries are hardly the best place to help gay men mature, learn from their experiences, and seek the support of...
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I knew that I was called to priesthood before I knew that I was gay. The lure of sacramental mystery that resonated with my young soul, the ready acceptance I found in my home parish community, and the care and attention shown me by priests of all...
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There’s a classic story of teen pregnancy, told in books, movies, and teen magazines over the past century. It goes something like this: a young girl falls in love for the first time, and, under the spell of first love, she “goes all the way” in the...
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Writing about the Vatican takeover of the International Commission on English in the Liturgy (ICEL) from bishops’ conferences (“Lost in Translation,” December 2), John Wilkins offered the rule of thumb he used when editor of the Tablet of London.
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Grown-Up Men
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Woody Allen is a writer, a comedian, and the maker of over seventy films. He recently spoke with Fr. Robert E. Lauder about the function of humor, film, and “the overwhelming bleakness of the universe.”
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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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The generations that have been formed in the cultural revolution of the 1960s are in some respects deeply alienated from a strong traditional model of Christian faith in the West.
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As a young physician, I often second-guess myself. In practicing medicine such self-criticism is warranted, even obligatory, because a wrong diagnosis can lead to misguided therapy and may end in death. After working at a Catholic hospital in the...
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When is the Catholic Church being “political”? When is it being “too political”? During the recent election season, Minneapolis–St. Paul Archbishop John Nienstedt mailed a DVD to every Catholic household in Minnesota, urging the enactment of a...
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In 2003, Cardinal Alfonso López Trujillo of the Pontifical Council for the Family made headlines by claiming that condoms are unsafe because HIV “can easily pass through.”
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“Woman has always been unfairly discriminated against by man,” commencement speaker Henry Edmunds told the Philadelphia High School for Girls class of 1905. Edmunds was president of the city's Board of Public Education and a booster of progessive...
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Richard Nugent Hasselbach
As a former Catholic priest and a currently practicing Catholic, I find myself answering questions from people of all religions about the daily seamy headlines. They want my take on the situation. They want to know if I have seen, firsthand,...
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Novelist Gregory Maguire is a prominent figure in the world of children’s literature. Best known as a fantasy writer, Maguire, forty-nine, has written more than a dozen books for children. He also writes for adults.
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Catholics believe that the basic requirements of morality are accessible in principle to all human beings through the natural law. We also believe that Christ conferred on the church special insight into the requirements of natural law. Ideally,...
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Home GameAn Accidental Guide to FatherhoodMichael LewisW. W. Norton & Co., $23.95, 192 pp.________________________________________
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Politicized culture wars are debilitating because they almost always require partisans to denigrate the moral legitimacy of their opponents, and sometimes to deny their very humanity. It's often not enough to defeat a foe. Satisfaction only comes...
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Sometime in the next few months, the Vatican will issue a much-anticipated document addressing the issue of whether gay men can be ordained priests. The policy is being written by the Congregation for Catholic Education in preparation for the...
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The question of the proper legal status of same-sex partnerships is at the moment lively. On June 10, the Court of Appeal in Ontario defined marriage as “the voluntary union for life of two persons to the exclusion of all others,” thereby including...
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I was in my office one morning last April completing a pelvic exam on a sexually active sixteen-year-old girl. I’m a family doctor in a busy private practice. As a Catholic, I have many concerns about teenagers who are sexually active, but I...
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I have always been a strong advocate of adoption. It is a family tradition: my parents adopted my sister; my husband and I adopted our youngest, my sister and her husband adopted their little girl; and my brother-in-law and his wife adopted both...
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The Civil Partnership Act of 2004 has been in force in the United Kingdom for almost three years. A civil partnership confers on same-sex couples the same mutual rights, benefits, and responsibilities in domestic law as marriage does on spouses, and...
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In any given year, tragedy, family dysfunction, poverty, neglect, and abuse separate hundreds of thousands of children from their birth parents.
Where adoption cannot be arranged, many of these children find themselves moved from one foster...
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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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There is no doubt that the industrialized West is going through a profound change in the way it regards homosexuality. The Supreme Court’s recent decision that antisodomy laws violate a constitutional right to privacy caused a great stir-not...
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Later this year, the Vatican is expected to begin an apostolic visitation of U.S. seminaries. The visitation comes in the wake of the clergy sexual-abuse scandal, a scandal some in the Vatican attribute to the alleged lack of discipline or worse...
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James Martin, William McDonough
William McDonough
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The struggle over admitting self-acknowledged homosexuals into the armed services has something to do with the nature of the military but a lot more to do with the nature of homosexuality.
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To be honest, we never expected a welcome. We certainly never expected an invitation.
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A few months ago, I was fortunate to hear a BBC radio abridgement of All Will Be Well: A Memoir, read by the Irish novelist, John McGahern, who died of cancer at the end of March. A light tenor voice, scarcely betraying his seventy-one years,...
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Margaret O'Brien Steinfels
The Catholic Church speaks clearly and succinctly of marriage. Marriage is “a covenant by which a man and a woman establish between themselves a partnership of their whole life and which of its own very nature is ordered to the well-being of the...
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Americans are deeply divided over what the moral, public, and legal status of homosexuality should be. A vast majority thinks homosexuals should be accorded broad toleration as a privacy matter and should not be discriminated against on the job....
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Go into any gym and you’ll see people improving themselves. The woman on the biceps machine is building strength in that muscle, perfecting her natural attribute by practicing a range of motion against resistance that will make her stronger in every...
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A few years ago I had the chance to have a long conversation with then-Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger in Straubing, a small, beautiful town in Lower Bavaria. Ratzinger was there to celebrate the annual feast day of Germany’s oldest surviving...
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Strange things do happen. Earlier this month Senator Jesse Helms (R-N.C.), chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee, relented after years of obstructionism and allowed the United States to pay its back dues to the United Nations. If Helms can...
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One wonders what the Vatican’s Congregation for the Doctrine of Faith (CDF) hoped to accomplish with the July 31 release of its statement, “Considerations Regarding Proposals to Give Legal Recognition to Unions between Homosexual...
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Among the varieties of Christian experience, none is more pleasing to the senses than a stately Anglican liturgy, from the opening procession to the altar to the choir’s hymns and chants. Liturgy-and language appropriate to it-is what makes...
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The McCain-Palin campaign says it’s for change, and it certainly delivered change with its abrupt abandonment of the long-standing conservative view of teen pregnancy. For decades, religious conservatives in the Republican Party pointed to teen...
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One of the many ways the Constitution’s framers showed their collective wisdom was by embedding the rule of law into the very framework of our system of government. Judicial review of popularly enacted laws keeps the majority accountable to...
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Christopher C. Roberts, Leslie Woodcock Tentler, Luke Timothy Johnson, Nancy A. Dallavalle, Patricia Hampl, Paul Baumann, R. R. Reno, Tina Beattie, William L. Portier
During the 1960s, nearly 80 percent of adult Americans were married. A recent analysis of U.S. census data reported that only 52 percent of adult Americans were married in 2009. That is the lowest percentage reported in the hundred years the Census...
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I had a brief but calamitous career as a Boy Scout. When I was in eighth grade my family moved from Connecticut to Ohio. In an effort to integrate us into our new community, my brother and I were enrolled in the Scouts. We had never been Cub...
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The consequences of the sexual-abuse scandal in the Roman Catholic Church in the United States continue to unfold. On the surface, the crisis is about sex. Beneath the surface, the crisis is about the church’s teaching authority. The crisis...
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Many Roman Catholics, ordained and lay, were understandably concerned when the Vatican issued its statement last fall barring men with “deep-seated homosexual tendencies” from the priesthood. If a priest is faithful to his promise of...
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For a meeting about sex education, the turnout was curiously small. Then again, none of the parents of the kids in my parish’s religious education program had been told why we’d been summoned in the first place. The woman who runs the Sunday-morning...
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The body is the only sign of who we are. That is why in canonical iconography God the Father is not depicted (because he cannot be imagined, which is to say imaged), and why the Son can (because he is the only image we can have of God’s...
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What is the significance of the New York Times’s decision (September 1) to include "public celebrations of commitment by gay and lesbian couples" in its Sunday "Weddings" pages? For many, the question is Why did it take the Times so long to...
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I’ve been having a lot of sex lately. Back when I was randy teenager this would have seemed like an impossible dream-come-true, but now that I’m thirty-seven-and my wife and I are still trying to fill our empty nursery-it’s a bit...
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There is a place where even the liberal Catholic press fears to tread. The relative lack of serious discussion about homosexual desire casts into spiritual darkness a tribe of believing Catholic men and women who must fend for themselves in their...
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I taught religion in an all-male Catholic high school in New York City for several years. And I have the scars to prove it. My first few weeks were predictably difficult, and I soon realized why so many veteran teachers warned me not to smile...
