“She was not patient. She was not kind. Edna was not the neighbor ready with a warm welcome when we bought the house on Harrison Street next door to hers.”
“We do what we are supposed to do, walk the stage, say our lines. But the reality is that, even if we hit our marks, many of our patients will not survive.”
Joe Biden’s Irish-Catholic background and personal experience of suffering have made him an eloquent and empathetic mourner for people across the political spectrum.
For cystic fibrosis patients, recent medical breakthroughs have offered a new life: like Lazarus, they are unwrapping their bandages and re-entering the world.
Some two decades ago, I took a cruise on the MS Zaandam. The Catholic rituals for the dead that I witnessed in Venezuela can help us process the death around us.
David Bentley Hart’s book makes the case for universal salvation, arguing that a belief in eternal damnation is morally repugnant and theologically insupportable.
Giving medical professionals some agency in end-of-life decisions can be consistent with church teaching. We just need to integrate the concept of futility.
“We might then think of our redeemed bodies almost like diamonds, simultaneously refracting different times of our lives as we turn in the light of God’s love.”
The short poems of Samuel Menashe are unique: self-contained epigrams, charms, wishes, prayers, descriptive one-shots, shapely units of quotable wisdom.
At the center of Malick’s film is Jägerstätter’s incomprehensible decision to give his life away, ostensibly benefiting no one. But such heroism ultimately wins.
Fiction is hard. Nonfiction is hard for different reasons: the need to ensure accuracy, the risk of angering your subjects. These books succeed brilliantly.
Available for the first time in English translation, the letters of a young German couple whose love of God and each other sustained them against Nazi oppression.
My brother Robert, always in and out of treatment, was a gift. He taught me to accept my own frustrations, and to curb the envy of others I sometimes felt.
Despite his full, long life, the death of Jean Vanier is still sad. And as Christians, we must not skip grief nor automatically reach for a happy narrative.
A new book describes everything one could wish to know about Hell: fire, brimstone, and boiling oil, but also the history of the idea across religions.
