The Shakers, who arrived in America in 1774, are a religious community facing extinction. Their decline means nothing less than the end of an idea of heaven.
The sisters I met along the border know well the intractability of poverty, disease, and violence. That does not keep them from working to relieve them.
I’m nineteen years old, the year is 1958, and I’ve already made it through the first nine months of probation. More than anything in the world I want to be a saint.
A city is noisy, dirty, sometimes cruel, sometimes surprisingly kind, always restless, constantly building over its own past. Like all things, it needs prayer.
The Catholic Church now has a stronger theology of women deacons than it did during the fraught time of Paul VI. But now political conditions are less auspicious.
This year seems unusual, both for the number and scale of protests across the world. What links them is the growing demand for greater income equality.
The bishops’ insistence on abortion as the preeminent political issue reveals their resistance to Pope Francis’s call to serve the common good in all its complexity.
The territory along the Syrian-Turkish border is the ancestral homeland of an ancient tradition of Aramaic-speaking Christianity. They’ve been betrayed before.
