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Gary Gutting , Kenneth R. Miller, Stephen M. Barr
Few recent works of philosophy have provoked as much controversy as Thomas Nagel’s Mind and Cosmos: Why the Materialist Neo-Darwinian Conception of Nature Is Almost Certainly False (Oxford University Press, $24.95, 130 pp.).
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Last October the Roman Catholic Church elevated to sainthood two women of North America: Mother Marianne Cope, the German-American nun who spent her life providing solace to the lepers of Molokai, and <
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Is capitalism an enemy of the good life? Marxists and other radicals think so.
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Beginning in Advent of this year, the language of the Mass will be very different. A new translation of the Roman Missal—the book of prayers used in the Mass—will be put into use in all Catholic churches in the English-speaking world. Some who have...
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At the end of The Wizard of Oz (still wonderful after all these years), the Wicked Witch of the West is confounded, a failure. Dissolving in puddle of water, she moans, “What a world, what a world.” I’m with her.
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As I begin what will be my seventh (!) decade as a Catholic, I find that I am less and less sure of what Catholics believe.
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1963: Vatican II allowed the use of “the mother tongue” in the liturgy, entrusting bishops conferences with overseeing translations, which Rome would then approve. Bishops conferences throughout the English-speaking world established the...
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John F. Desmond, Kevin Tortorelli, Thomas L. Kuhlman
Not a Reset Button
Thomas L. Kuhlman
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Sandra Dutton, Wayne Sheridan
Richard Ford is the author of the novels The Sportswriter,
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Many years ago I started looking for a copy of Joseph Ratzinger’s Theological Highlights of Vatican II, then long out of print. Copies were as rare and as prized as gold dust, but eventually I found one in Chicago, among the office bookshelves of a...
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I’m tired of being nice about it, tired of being politically correct when this issue comes up. So I’ll be blunt. Someone just left my parish to join one that has an altar on wheels, and I’m angry about it.
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In the fall of 1965, I worked in the final session of the Second Vatican Council. A young priest and doctoral candidate, I was tasked with distributing documents and collecting votes and amendments from my assigned section of bishops.
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Richard Linklater’s bittersweet 2008 film Me and Orson Welles tells of an impressionable teenager who gets the chance to work with his idol, Orson Welles, in the famed Mercury Theater production of Julius Caesar, and in the process learns a great...
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Last year marked the thirtieth anniversary of the death of Mary Lou Williams, the jazz pianist, composer, and arranger. There are few women in the pantheon of great jazz instrumentalists, and even fewer jazz performers in the pantheon of great...
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Pope Benedict's resignation shouldn't have surprised us as much as it did. As an institutionalist who believes in the Roman Catholic Church as the carrier of truth in a sinful world, he would worry a great deal about the impact of his own...
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"The church is not the pope, and the pope is not the church,” theologian Joseph Komonchak reminds us (see “Benedict’s Act of Humility”). Amen to that.
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By resigning, Pope Benedict served the church well. He has spared it another prolonged period of mounting disarray. He has "humanized" the papacy, as Joseph Komonchak and others have pointed out.
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Broadway’s most recent foray into Catholicism has come to an abrupt halt: The Broadway testimony of the mother of Jesus—as written by the award-winning Irish writer and onetime altar boy Colm Tóibín and spit out with furious anger by the formidable...
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One early morning not long ago I woke with a strange physical sense of myself as the product of eons, rather than my usual tired twenty-first-century self.
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Public expressions of grief, even at their most authentic, are a kind of performance.
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I first met Gia, a young schoolgirl, one afternoon while walking with Moy Moy, our twenty-one-year-old daughter who has special needs. Gia was on her way home from classes. She approached us full of questions about why Moy was in a stroller, why she...
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In 2005, a commentary on the Acts of the Apostles by Jaroslav Pelikan, the great historian of theology, appeared as the inaugural entry in the Brazos Theological Commentary on the Bible (Brazos Press).
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All the suffering we have seen recently—the dead Palestinian children, the casualties of civil war in Syria and the Congo, and the personal travails of so many—makes me think that what human beings must endure demands what the Incarnation offers.
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One of the most striking things about Jesus as recorded in the Gospels—at least to me—is how directly he speaks to people. Yes, he often taught through parables—paradoxical, sometimes funny stories that continue to generate endless interpretations....
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The last pope to resign did so more than seven hundred years ago, which is a long time even by church standards.
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What do the Roman Catholic Church and the American political system have in common? Both are divided into factions that neither trust nor understand each other, and both confront a crisis of governance.
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In winning election as Pope Francis, Jorge Mario Bergoglio defied the papal pundits, even though they should have seen him coming. His rise marks the decisive shift within Roman Catholicism toward Latin America and the developing world. In...
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No figure in the Christian pantheon except Jesus, the Virgin Mary, and John the Baptist has inspired, provoked, or confounded the imagination of painters more than the Magdalene.
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In the earliest years of Christian teaching, dogma was proclaimed only when a denial of something (Jesus’ humanity or his divinity, for example) made it necessary. The articulated doctrine of the Trinity emerged slowly, from the more important...
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MADE FOR MEAT
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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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Che Guevara once wrote that the true revolutionary is guided by great feelings of love. For some—especially those over fifty—that remark will call up the illusions of the 1960s, when many a callow undergraduate succumbed to the charms of revolution...
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I went to a Catholic school where everyone went to daily Mass.
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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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For a long time I’ve been bothered by the difference between the expressions “I’ve been lucky” and “I’ve been blessed”—and also by the similarities between them. Often the phrase “I’ve been blessed” feels true to me, and I have no doubt, as a...
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We usually see the pictures hanging on our walls only out of the corner of an eye as we’re hurrying past them. But every once in a while, we pause, look up from our busyness, and find ourselves drawn to one of them.
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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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Behind the forty-day preparation for Easter known as Lent (the word actually means “springtime”) is the image of the desert. The Bible describes the forty-year desert sojourn of the Chosen People as preparation for entrance into the Promised Land....
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Here’s what I believe: If you plan for the most vulnerable, the world works better for everyone. Organize a busy street so a deaf child with a physical disability can cross it safely and suddenly you’ve got a street safe enough for an elderly person...
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Rep. Paul Ryan has long enjoyed a reputation as a wonk’s wonk. Here was a Republican politician happy to engage in substantive conversation about tax policy, debt, and the future of entitlement programs.
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We always had really tall Christmas trees at home—so tall they usually reached right to the living-room ceiling of our family’s house in the Fresh Meadows neighborhood of Queens. Every year Mother would say, “Perhaps a smaller one would do this time...
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On October 11, 1963, Bishop Luigi Bettazzi addressed the Second Vatican Council on the need for collegiality. He was the newest bishop participant, having been consecrated only a week before, and, at thirty-nine, he was also one of the youngest.
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Elizabeth Kirkland Cahill
The medieval manuscripts currently on view at Manhattan’s Jewish Museum in Crossing Borders: Manuscripts from the Bodleian Libraries are stunning in their beauty.
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Several Orthodox friends have asked what I think of Pope Benedict XVI’s resignation. A few are, like me, former Roman Catholics. When I mentioned Joseph A. Komonchak’s comment in Commonweal (“Benedict’s Act of Humility”) that the pope’s resignation...
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Is religious conscience special? And what kinds of claims (if any) does conscience warrant? These are two of the many questions Brian Leiter raises in his provocative book Why Tolerate Religion? (Princeton University Press, $24.95, 192 pp.).
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In our 2005 series of articles titled “What Next?”, Commonweal asked several writers to look at the challenges the then newly elected Benedict XVI was likely to face.
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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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It will be a great day in the history of science if we sometime discover a damp shadow elsewhere in the universe where a fungus has sprouted. The mere fossil trace of life in its simplest form would be the crowning achievement of generations of...
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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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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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Deftly, admiral, cast your flyInto the slow deep hover,Till the wise old trout mistake and die;Salt are the deeps that coverThe glittering fleets you led,White is your head.
—W. H. Auden
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Although I hate to admit that I was ever unhappy in Africa, where I lived for twenty-six years, I have to confess that my first year as a Jesuit scholastic in Nigeria, over forty years ago, was not the easiest, either for me or for the fellow...
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People have been explaining themselves, their relationship to the gods, and what life means with myths for thousands of years, before language began to be written down and ever since. One of the first epics to be recorded, the Babylonian tale of...
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Taking their inspiration from the Qur’an, Muslims refer to Jews, Christians, Zoroastrians, and a harder-to-define faith community, the Sabians, as “People of the Book.” These monotheistic neighbors of Muhammad (c.
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I have often found that interreligious dialogue becomes most interesting when it gets stuck, and that was my experience in Korea last month. I was in the country at the invitation of Zen Master Jinje and the Chogye Order of Korean Zen Buddhists.
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The Jewish tradition holds that the Lord directly ordered Abraham to perform circumcision (Genesis 17:11). The order applied to Moses (Lev. 12:3), and was continued by Joshua for the freed slaves of the Exodus (Joshua 5:2). Centuries later, Ezekiel...
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In the Gospel of Matthew, “wise men (magi) from the East” come to Jerusalem after the birth of Christ, asking, “Where is he who has been born king of the Jews? We saw his star rising in the East and have come to worship him.” (Matt 2:1–2) Matthew...
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I was a young Episcopal seminarian in the 1960s and in the spirit of Martin Luther King could often be found on picket lines marching in support of the social justice issues of the time. In the ensuing decades, while serving as commissioner of the...
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A little more than a year ago, in November 2011, Catholic and Muslim leaders from around the world convened in Jordan for the second forum hosted by A Common Word, an organization created in 2007 to promote interfaith engagement by highlighting...
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In a certain sense, every Christian is Jewish. This is something I could have told you years ago—I’m a scholar of religion, after all. But it’s possible to know a thing without fully comprehending it. While I knew that Christianity started out as a...
