by George Weigel My fascination with Ukraine began in 1984, during a sabbatical year at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars. One of the first friends I made among my fellow Fellows was Dr. Bohdan Bociurkiw, a Ukrainian-Canadian professor at Carleton University in Ottawa. We first connected through a mutual interest in religious freedom […]
by George Weigel When Francis Eugene George first sought admission to the Chicago seminary in the 1950s, Chicago Catholicism imagined itself the future of the Catholic Church in the western world – and not without reason. A lot of the ferment in Catholic intellectual, liturgical and pastoral life that would eventually produce the Second Vatican […]
by Dr. E. Barry Gordon, M.D. UNFORTUNATELY, THE “Ask the Doctor” column of Nov. 23 about the risks and benefits of testosterone therapy was as inaccurate and misleading as most media reports concerning testosterone. Here I can only address a few of the fallacies. The author made major reference to the recently publicized Veterans Administration […]
by Father Tadeusz Pacholczyk AT THE BEGINING of December, the American Civil Liberties Union filed a sweeping federal lawsuit against the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops over its Ethical and Religious Directives for Catholic hospitals and health care services, alleging that the directives, with their prohibition against direct abortion, resulted in negligent care of a […]
by Sister Karen M. Cavanagh, C.S.J. Are we there yet? How much longer? In today’s technological world, we might not hear that question uttered aloud from a traveler. In a car, we can check the GPS. On a plane, we can track our travel, the miles flown and miles to go and know almost exactly […]
by George Weigel The flurry of instabooks published shortly after the election of Pope Francis didn’t shed much light on the formation, character and interests of Jorge Mario Bergoglio or the likely trajectory of his pontificate. Now comes something serious: “Pope Francis: Our Brother, Our Friend – Personal Recollections About the Man Who Became Pope,” […]
by Father Eugene F. Hemrick AFTER EXPERIENCING Christmas for so many years, it’s easy for it to become “just another” Christmas. It makes me think of a quote by A.J. Conyers in his book, “The Listening Heart: Vocation and the Crisis of Modern Culture.” Conyers says the following: “To be modern is to exist increasingly […]
by George Weigel IN HIS 2008 BOOK, “The Faithful: A History of Catholics in America,” Boston College historian James M. O’Toole did a fine job of fleshing out the conventional U.S. Catholic story-line by emphasizing the role prominent lay men and women played in the Catholic experience in these United States. Yet there seemed to […]
by Effie Caldarola In Flannery O’Connor’s novel, “Wise Blood,” the protagonist senses Jesus moving “from tree to tree in the back of his mind, a wild ragged figure.” I fell in love with that phrase long ago and imagined Jesus, intriguing, mysterious and persistent, flitting in and out of our consciousness, but at the end […]
by Cindy Wooden Pope Francis’ apostolic exhortation (See Page 11) on sharing the joy of the Gospel is a call to faith-filled optimism, recognizing challenges but knowing that God’s love and lordship will prevail, said Archbishop Rino Fisichella, introducing the text to the media. The archbishop, president of the Pontifical Council for Promoting New Evangelization, told […]
