Your Holiness:
Grace and peace in our Lord Jesus Christ.
Guest Columnists
Finding Common Ground in A World of Differences
by Karen Osborne Things would have been really different if I had been born in 1880, not 1980. In the grand scheme of history, 100 years isn’t even close to being a drop in the bucket. When you’re talking about a human life, however, 100 years is a long time. If I had been born […]
John Paul and Francis At Yad Vashem
As that familiar parody of bad fiction has it, “it was a dark and stormy night” – March 21, 2000 to be precise – when I made my way from the Jerusalem Hilton to the Notre Dame Center to meet a senior Vatican official who had promised me a diskette with the addresses John Paul II would deliver during his epic visit to the Holy Land.
Foreign-Policy-by-Hashtag: #BeatAdolf?
The first 15 minutes of “Saving Private Ryan” and the jump sequence in the second episode of “Band of Brothers” are vivid reminders of the extraordinary courage displayed on D-Day, 70 years ago.
The Permanent Diaconate: A Call to Service
The renewal of the permanent diaconate is one of the greatest legacies of the Second Vatican Council.
Should CCHD Be Used for Schools?
It’s commencement season, and tens of thousands of students are graduating from inner-city Catholic elementary schools. As decades of empirical research have shown, these kids have a better chance of successfully completing high school and college.
Editing Our Own Genes?
A number of serious diseases are known to occur because of defects or mutations in our DNA. Curing such diseases could in principle be carried out by rewriting the DNA to fix the mutated base pairs. Yet until recently, scientists have remained largely stymied in their attempts to directly modify genes in a living animal. Findings described in the March 30, 2014 issue of Nature Biotechnology, however, reveal that a novel gene-editing technique, known as CRISPR (Clustered Regularly Interspaced Short Palindromic Repeats), can be used successfully in mice to reverse disease symptoms for a liver defect known as type I tyrosinemia.
An Archbishop of Destiny
When we first met in April, 2011, what initially impressed me about Major-Archbishop Sviatoslav Shevchuk was his almost preternatural calm, which was striking in that less than a month before and still a few weeks shy of his 41st birthday, Shevchuk had been elected Major-Archbishop of Kyiv-Halych and head of the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church – the largest of the Eastern Catholic Churches, Byzantine in liturgy and governance while in full communion with the Bishop of Rome.
Mindfulness Doesn’t Replace God’s Help
I’m teaching a slightly unusual college freshman course this spring called “The Virtues.” It’s not quite philosophy or theology, at least not after the typical academic fashion. It’s an attempt to present the virtues as something students might want to practice and not just study.
Humanae Vitae: What If?
Cardinal Carlo Caffarra of Bologna has long been a vocal supporter of the teaching on the morally appropriate means of family planning set forth in “Humanae Vitae” (“Of Human Life”).