NEWS IN AUGUST that President Jimmy Carter’s cancer had spread from his liver to his brain brought sadness to many in America and around the world, but his assurance that he will be “at ease with whatever comes” came as no surprise to those who have followed the 39th president of the United States over the years.
THE QUESTION THAT haunts the aftermath of tragedies resulting in death and heartbreak is often the same: Could any of us have seen it coming and stopped it? The news was indeed horrific the morning of Wednesday, Aug. 26 when two Roanoke, Virginia, journalists in their 20s with promising careers and marriages to look forward to were gunned down during a live broadcast.
A brilliant article by a German Catholic philosopher, Professor Thomas Stark, suggests that an argument beneath the argument may be afoot in the controversies that will be aired at the Synod of Bishops in October.
AT CHRISTMAS 1969, Professor Joseph Ratzinger gave a radio talk with the provocative title, “What Will the Future Church Look Like?” (You can find it in “Faith and the Future,” published by Ignatius Press). One of the concluding paragraphs was destined to become perhaps the most quoted excerpt from his extensive bibliography, when Professor Ratzinger became Pope Benedict XVI:
Ultrasound technology was in its early days when my wife and I were having children. I couldn’t tell top from bottom. The doctors could, though. It became possible for the first time to tell the sex of the baby before it was born.
This summer, my husband and I did something we didn’t do when we lived in Alaska – we took road trips throughout 48 states. And in some of those places we visited cemeteries. On this summer’s trip, since we both love Abraham Lincoln, we stopped at the Gettysburg battlefield – and the cemetery where Lincoln delivered his famous address.
WHILE READING a United Nations Development Program report on violence in Latin America, I encountered the term “aspirational crimes,” used to explain the tragic acceleration in crimes on and by young people. The term refers to crimes motivated by money and the irresistible desire for consumption. Partly this is to support one’s family in situations where poverty is intolerable. But a large part is for the “cool” gadgets, shoes, clothes, electronics, etc., that swell a young man’s swagger and elevate his position within a gang, mark his achievement and anesthetize his misery for the moment.
ON CATHOLIC CAMPUSES that aspire to Top Ten or Top Twenty status in publicity sweepstakes like the U.S. News and World Report college rankings, one sometimes hears the phrase “preferred peers.” Translated into plain English from faux-sociologese, that means the schools to which we’d like to be compared (and be ranked with).
Queried about the Holy See’s less-than-vigorous response to Russian aggression in Ukraine, senior Vatican officials are given to saying – often with a dismissive tone, as if the question came from a dimwit – “We take the long view.” On the diplomatic side, that “long view” seems to be a reprise of the Ostpolitik of Cardinal […]
ONCE UPON A time, I thought road trips were boring. Sitting in the back seat, bored to tears with the books I’d brought and the sounds of my brother’s video games, I’d zone out, daydream and wait for the ride to be over. Boredom on the road ended abruptly when I got my license. When you’re driving, you have to pay attention to everything. There’s no room for error. You’re behind the wheel of a killing machine, and so is everyone else.
