WHEN I FIRST visited Israel in 1988, my friend, Professor Menahem Milson, a distinguished Arabist at Hebrew University who was Egyptian president Anwar Sadat’s military aide during Sadat’s historic visit to Jerusalem in 1977, told me that “you have to meet my friend, Colonel Yigal Carmon.”
A family is like a tree: We, the branches, can all grow in different directions but our roots remain the same. Summertime becomes a chance to care for those roots by spending time with our loved ones.
The appointment of Hispanic bishops as ordinaries of dioceses in California, Texas or Florida is rather common. This is not surprising since most Catholics in the South and the West are Hispanic.
THE CLAIM THAT “the Cold War is over” and that the West needs a “new paradigm” for relations with Russia has become an antiphon in some conservative political circles, not least conservative Christian circles. The call for serious and creative thinking about Russia is welcome and sensible. The claim that the Cold War is over is not, because Vladimir Putin never got that memo. Ignoring that reality means danger in devising any new paradigm.
Asked to name books that gave me the greatest intellectual jolt in recent decades, I’d quickly cite two.
Make it a priority to make physical contact with someone or to read a book rather than a blog. Revel in the physical matter that makes up our life on this earth.
Precisely 50 years ago this month, a tall, gangly Aussie named George Pell entered my life. By the end of August 1967, he had become a fast friend of my family. Today, the friendship is even closer and it is one of the great blessings of my life.
by Carolyn Woo
WHILE PREPARING for the Convocation of Catholic Leaders, I paused on a statement describing a design principle for the event. In calling for missionary discipleship, the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops in the participant guidebook cites Pope Francis’ caution that “‘mere administration’ can no longer be enough.”
by David H. Powell
IN THE PREFACE to her new book “Poetic Flotsam,” Magdalen Radovich (Mater Christi H.S. ’80) says that books of poetry are confessions of a literary mudlark: the poet, like the mudlark, burrows through old stuff “in the hopes of finding something of value on which to subsist.”
I RECENTLY MET the good people of St. Benedict Elementary School in South Natick, Mass., which offers classical Catholic education to some very fortunate youngsters. The extensive summer reading lists the school suggests to those kids’ parents put me in mind of my high school English teacher, the late Father W. Vincent Bechtel – who did not, however, do suggestions, and made sure that his charges kept their noses to the grindstone from June through August by assigning us at least a half-dozen novels every summer. Some of them, like Paul Horgan’s “Things As They Are,” I still re-read with pleasure, a half-century later.
