By Maureen Pratt RECENTLY, I TRIED to interview two people and they declined because, each one told me at separate times, on different days: “I’m too old.” Oh, dear. In an era when time seems like a rare and precious commodity, I can understand that there are occasions when we don’t have a minute in […]
By Carole Norris Greene AT THE HEIGHT of the rioting in Baltimore in late April following the death of Freddie Gray, a 25-year-old African-American man who died after being in police custody, the city’s mayor referred to those destroying properties as “thugs.” Stephanie Rawlings-Blake, the Baltimore mayor, later apologized for the reference after being criticized […]
By Moises Sandoval THE EPITAPH ON my mother’s gravestone says, “Her family was her world.” These words, written by my sister Lucy, summed up her life. She spent every moment of her 86 years caring for, worrying about, lobbying and praying for her family. Her name was Amada, which means loved. I think of her […]
A report for the synod suggests that German Catholic thinking is virtually indistinguishable from that of non-believers on matters of marriage, the family, the morality of human love and the things that make for genuine happiness.
By Karen Osborne I’ve been thinking a lot about hope, lately. I live in Baltimore and for the past few weeks, we’ve been in the news for peaceful and violent reasons. We’ve seen the entire spectrum of protest, from burning police cars to calm speeches in front of City Hall following the death of Freddie […]
On Sept. 2, 1939, the House of Commons debated the British government’s response to the German invasion of Poland the previous day. The ruling Conservative Party was badly divided between those demanding that Britain fulfill its obligations to Poland and those addicted to the habits of appeasement. “Party loyalty” was being invoked to drown out […]
RECENTLY, HOLY CROSS Father Theodore M. Hesburgh, president emeritus of the University of Notre Dame, passed away at the age of 97. During my years at Notre Dame, Father Ted, as some of us called him, became a mentor and a friend whose guidance has been imprinted on every decision I made since our first meeting in 1997.
Morgan Atkinson’s new documentary on Thomas Merton, the famed Trappist monk from the Cistercian abbey in Gethsemani, Ky., was “40 years in the making,” he joked.
I’VE BEEN THINKING a lot these days about the geometry of leadership. Those thoughts are prompted by invitations I have had to speak to college students about leadership and also by the recent death of a great educational leader, Holy Cross Father Theodore M. Hesburgh, and by the emergence in Iowa and New Hampshire of presidential hopefuls as the primary season begins to heat up.
IN THE YEARS PRECEDING the Great Jubilee of 2000, John Paul II held a series of continental synods to help the Church in different locales reflect on its distinctive situation at the end of the second millennium, and to plan for a future of evangelical vigor in the third. These Special Assemblies were easily named in the case of the Synods for Africa, Asia and Europe. But when it came to the Synod for the western hemisphere, John Paul threw a linguistic curveball that made an important point.
