Opinion
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Sept. 1-8, 2014
‘If you want to meet the poor, take the bus.” That’s a saying I’ve heard many times from my brother Jesuits. It refers not so much to transportation within cities (though it certainly could) as to long-distance travel. My own preference, especially here in the Northeastern United States, is traveling by train: in these parts Amtrak is quick, reliable and relatively inexpensive if you plan far enough in advance. As for planes, well, to be charitable, I’ll...
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Sept. 1-8, 2014
The exercise is brief, but revealing. During the first session of my parish’s adult Christian initiation program, the leader challenges the group: Draw what you think of when you hear the word church. The potential candidates and catechumens furrow their brows and grab a marker. Most of them produce a skeletal picture of a building—a square structure beneath a pointy roof with a cross on top, a few stained glass windows, a large door. Sometimes...
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Sept. 1-8, 2014
Into Africa
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Sept. 1-8, 2014
Francis, the first Jesuit pope in history, is a missionary. Like his fellow Jesuits Francis Xavier and Matteo Ricci before him, he passionately desires to share “the joy of the Gospel” with the peoples of Asia, a continent with a rich diversity of peoples, religions and cultures, where 60 percent of the world’s population lives, among them a tiny Christian minority.
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Sept. 1-8, 2014
I’m not exactly an imposing guy. I don’t pump much iron. I guess I can wear a lot of dark clothing, but that’s usually accompanied by a clerical collar. And the Iowa niceness I grew up around comes across pretty quickly.
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Sept. 1-8, 2014
By noon the parade was over, and the revelers had gathered in a park on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. They shared cigars, gave speeches and drank from kegs of lager “mounted in every conceivable place.” The occasion was the first Labor Day parade, held on Sept. 5, 1882, and though police feared riots, the day passed without incident. The lively crowd of union workers and supporters represented a burgeoning force in American public life.
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August 18-25, 2014
Across the street from the otherwise thoroughly middle-class Havana home of Che Guevara, about an eighth of a mile from the enshrined debris of a downed American U-2 flight, stands the Cristo de La Habana, a 66-foot-high statue of Jesus Christ carved out of 320 tons of marble.
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August 18-25, 2014
Assisted Suicide Split
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August 18-25, 2014
Gaza is being reduced to rubble while the world watches on YouTube and CNN. It has been as dispiriting a display of inhumanity and failure as one can imagine, yet it has not been enough to compel either side to accept a halt to the carnage. Each night new images of what Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu described as “telegenically dead Palestinians” are paraded across television and computer screens.
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August 18-25, 2014
Last October in America, Pope Francis warned the church against being “obsessed” with abortion, gay marriage and the use of contraceptive methods. Washington, especially the religious right and secular left, shares this obsession.