In All Things
A group blog by the editors, columnists and frequent contributors to America.
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Aug 21 2014 - 3:52pm0 comments
The ride to the church seemed too short to give me time to unleash all those tears. I had to preach. What would I say?
How do you preach what you feel when you’re one of only a few black people in the church?
What do you say to a mostly white congregation after the shooting death of 18-year-old Michael Brown? What do you say after prayers and litanies are offered to remind us that we are called to promote justice and peace?
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Aug 21 2014 - 11:50am0 comments
Like most folks I have been following events in Ferguson, Missouri with equal measures of despair and frustration. I have even watched the live feed from Vice news before a queasy feeling sent me away from my computer screen—the realization that I may have stumbled upon a new cultural phenom which can only be described as riot porn.
After a week of following the story on the Internet and via social media, I have come to conclude a few things:
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Aug 20 2014 - 7:09pm0 comments
Cambridge, MA. As many of you will know by now, BKS Iyengar, the distinguished and venerable master of yoga, died on August 20 at age 95. A student of the renowned T. Krishnamachari (1888-1989), who renewed yoga traditions for the modern era, Mr. Iyengar himself became a globally known and revered teacher himself. His disciples are found all over the world; many would come from afar for regular visits to his yoga center in Pune,...
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Aug 20 2014 - 8:57am7 comments
Father Greg Boyle, S.J., is an American Jesuit priest who works with Los Angeles street gangs as the founding director of Homeboy Industries in California. Before founding Homeboy Industries as a non-profit ministry to his neighborhood’s predominantly...
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Aug 19 2014 - 9:35am0 comments
In an analysis for Religion News Service David Gibson reports that America’s Christian conservatives are pondering a ‘Babylonian exile.’ Gibson discusses three forms of exile: a return to a pre-Moral Majority separation of church and politics, a Benedictine model and the Jeremiah option.
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Aug 18 2014 - 2:42pm0 comments
Pope Francis said “the unjust aggressor” against the minorities in Iraq “must be stopped” but, he added, no one state can decide to intervene by itself. The crime of aggression has to be taken to the UN to decide which are the best means to stop the aggressor. He made clear “I do not say bomb.”
He revealed that he had contemplated going to Kurdistan at the time he sent Cardinal Filoni, and said he does not yet exclude that possibility if it is necessary.
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Aug 18 2014 - 10:39am0 comments
Whatever the result of the imminent Scottish independence referendum, now only weeks away, a new and quite remarkable phenomenon is emerging in the country. Here we are seeing a notable surge in grassroots political awareness and debate, a new civic coalition of ideas and discussion, at least on the Yes side of the debate.
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Aug 17 2014 - 12:49pm1 comment
Pope Francis opened new horizons for the Catholic Churches in Asia with a groundbreaking talk to 70 bishops from 36 countries of this vast continent, on August 17, in which he encouraged them to engage in a dialogue that is based not only on identity but which also has to be done with “empathy.”
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Aug 16 2014 - 8:44pm0 comments
Cambridge, MA. A few days ago, I was in Paderborn, Germany, for a conference on comparative theology, its methods and purposes. (“Comparative theology:” faith seeking understanding even across religious borders, learning from other traditions so as better to understand our own and thus to deepen our understanding of our faith and theirs.)
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Aug 16 2014 - 11:51am0 comments
“Lay people were the first apostles of Korea,” Pope Francis said in his homily at mass in Seoul after beatifying 124 martyrs from the infancy period of the church in “the land of the morning calm.”
“All of them lived and died for Christ, and now they reign with him in joy and in glory,” he told the 800,000 people at the ceremony in front of Seoul’s Gwanghwamun Gate, a place closely linked to the past and recent history of this country. The place is not far from the site where many...
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Aug 15 2014 - 12:57pm0 comments
Pope Francis addressed the downside of the prosperous, highly competitive South Korean society on the second day of his visit here. He did so in words that went to the root of the concerns that are growing in the hearts of very many people here, both Christian and non, and especially of the young.
He opted to do so in his homily at his first public Mass on the Korean peninsula, celebrated before a crowd of 45,000 Korean Catholics in the World Cup Stadium at Daejeon, the country’s...
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Aug 15 2014 - 2:47am0 comments
The summer of 1974 was one of uncomprehending discontent; it was when everything was in a flux—and the wider world was no better. Here, in the United States, a presidency was endangered as a result of political gamesmanship; it was the summer of countless committees, investigations and TV coverage of a government that appeared to be no longer being relevant to ordinary lives. People (young and old) were looking at each other as if they were the ones wrecking the American dream.
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Aug 14 2014 - 3:05pm2 comments
In late June I drove to St. Louis, Mo., to attend a family reunion with 21 distant cousins I’d never met. Two days after my return, on June 28, I made a trip to Kansas City’s Liberty Memorial on the100-year anniversary of the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand whose murder triggered World War I. The memorial houses the National World War I Museum, the only World War I museum in the United States. As a child, my grandmother had been taken to the dedication of the Liberty Memorial in...
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Aug 14 2014 - 11:38am6 comments
Most Rev. Charles J. Chaput, O.F.M. Cap., is the current archbishop of Philadelphia. A member of the Prairie Band Potawatomi tribe, he is the first Native American archbishop. He holds a B.A. in philosophy from St. Fidelis College Seminary and an M.A. in...
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Aug 14 2014 - 9:49am0 comments
Pope Francis is not a man to ignore the real problems that touch people’s lives. It came as no surprise therefore that on his first day in Korea he zoned in with passion on the urgent need for peace and reconciliation in this divided peninsula.
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Aug 14 2014 - 7:58am0 comments
On the flight from Rome to South Korea, 40 minutes after take-off, a smiling Pope Francis came to the back of the plane to greet the 72 journalists from 11 countries, including 10 from South Korea, who were traveling with him.
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Aug 13 2014 - 9:48am0 comments
On his first visit to Asia as pope, Francis is going to South Korea. He left the Rome airport at four o’clock in the afternoon (local time), today August 13, on board an Alitalia flight.
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Aug 12 2014 - 5:23pm0 comments
Pope Francis will arrive in Seoul, South Korea, on the morning of August 14. The following day he will travel to Daejeon, the country’s fifth largest metropolis about 167 km south of Seoul, for the sixth Asian Youth Day (AYD). There he will meet thousands of young Catholics from most of the countries of this vast continent where 60 percent of the world’s young people live.
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Aug 12 2014 - 2:54pm2 comments
As a star heads towards its demise, it begins to spew out elements that are themselves the building blocks of stars and life. Quite literally, its death brings with it the beginnings of new life.
People are not that different. They, too, often have a way of mellowing in their latter years and nourishing those around them, even just in the quiet ways they continue to live their lives.
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Aug 12 2014 - 2:28pm2 comments
Two news stories featuring the placenta have appeared in the mainstream media within a month. One in the Science Section of The New York Times (7/14/14) and one in The Washington Post (8/ 5/14) The Times story entitled, “The push to understand the placenta,” describes new research on the amazing capacities of the little known organ; The Post story gives accounts of emerging practices involving the placenta as afterbirth. Some American women with the help of midwives are following the lead of...
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Aug 7 2014 - 8:51am112 comments
Father John Zuhlsdorf ("Father Z") is an American-born priest of the Suburbicarian Diocese of Velletri-Segni in Italy and a Catholic media figure. A convert from Lutheranism in college, he was ordained by Saint John Paul II in 1991. He worked in Rome as a collaborator in the Pontifical Commission “Ecclesia Dei” and is now in Madison, Wisconsin, where he serves with full diocesan faculties and functions also as president of the Tridentine Mass...
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Aug 6 2014 - 8:08pm0 comments
Archbishop Sir David Moxon, KNZM, the Archbishop of Canterbury’s Personal Representative to the Holy See, was formerly the Bishop of Waikato, Senior Bishop of the New Zealand Diocese, and the Anglican Archbishop and Primate of the Church in Aotearna, New Zealand and Polynesia. A native of New Zealand, Archbishop Moxon is the Anglican Chair of the Anglican Roman Catholic International Commission; a fellow of St. Margaret’s College in the University of Otago; an honorary fellow of...
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Aug 6 2014 - 9:00am8 comments
Father Richard Rohr, O.F.M., is a New Mexico-based Franciscan friar who is also a popular Catholic author and speaker. He is the author of dozens of books and recorded talks.
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Aug 5 2014 - 9:58am1 comment
Rigoberto González, a Mexican-American poet, was born in Bakersfield, Calif., in 1970. At the age of two, his family returned to Mexico, where he remained until 1980.
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Aug 5 2014 - 9:00am6 comments
Patrick J. Buchanan is a political commentator, author, syndicated columnist, politician, and broadcaster. He was a senior advisor to U.S. Presidents Richard Nixon, Gerald Ford, and Ronald Reagan. He accompanied President Nixon to China in 1972. Later he sought the Republican presidential nomination in 1992 and 1996. In 2000, he was the Reform Party’s presidential candidate.
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Aug 4 2014 - 11:41am1 comment
Mark Wegner is a Tampa-based Major League Baseball umpire. He worked in the National League from 1998 to 1999, and throughout both major leagues since 2000. Wearing number 14 on his jersey, he has umpired in seven Division Series between 2003 and 2013, in the 2007 National League Championship Series, the 2008 All-Star game and the 2013 World Series.
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Aug 3 2014 - 8:55am0 comments
Father Anthony Corcoran, S.J., is an American Jesuit priest based in Moscow who is the regional superior of all Jesuits currently working in the Russian Republic and surrounding countries. He assumed this post in 2008, when...
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Aug 2 2014 - 8:04am0 comments
Colleen Carroll Campbell is a Washington DC-based Catholic author, print and broadcast journalist and former presidential speechwriter for George W. Bush. Besides her two books, her writing has appeared in the New York Times, Washington Post, St. Louis Post-Dispatch, First Things and America. She also appears regularly on CNN, FOX News, MSNBC, PBS and NPR. She attended Marquette University before beginning her journalism career as a newspaper reporter.
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Aug 1 2014 - 4:12pm0 comments
Pope Francis will travel to Korea, from Aug. 13 to 18. He is going there for a meeting with young people from 30 Asian countries at the Sixth Asian Youth Day, and to beatify 124 Korean martyrs from the first 50 years of the Catholic Church’s existence in this East-Asian nation that was evangelized by lay-people in the 18th century.
It will be his first visit to Asia since becoming pope. He is the second pope to visit Korea and its vibrant Catholic community; John Paul II came here in...
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Aug 1 2014 - 1:29pm0 comments
Almost lost in the Vatican Gardens, with St. Peter’s Basilica looming on one side and the Apostolic Palace on the other, the Casina Pio IV may be easily overlooked. This small retreat provides a snapshot into the baroque lifestyle of the Popes in the 16th-century. It was here, amidst the works of Barocci and Zuccari, that Catholics and Anglicans, diplomats and NGO representatives, academics and journalists all gathered in the Great Hall of the Pontifical Academy of Sciences (housed in the...
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Aug 1 2014 - 8:25am0 comments
Lionel (Michael Lebron) is a New York-based nationally syndicated talk radio veteran and television personality. He is also an ex-prosecutor, author, bluegrass musician and standup comedian.
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