Columns
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June 22-29, 2015
Pope Francis is onto something in his recent linking of the crisis of faith to the crisis in the alliance of the man and the woman and the radical task this link implies. This insight is as old as Genesis; but, as usual, Francis brings old truths to life in new and straightforward ways.
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June 8-15, 2015
‘It sounds so Jewish!” one woman exclaimed during our recent pilgrimage to the Holy Land. We were in the Church of the Pater Noster, outside the walls of the Old City in Jerusalem. On this spot, according to tradition (which means it could have happened anywhere nearby), Jesus taught his disciples the Our Father. Our tour guide, a Melkite Catholic from Galilee named Maher, had just recited the prayer in Aramaic, Jesus’ native tongue.
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May 25-June 1, 2015
For anyone just waking from a 12-year coma, the United States has not been doing well in the Middle East. This might make you wonder why, after sowing chaos in Iraq and Libya and waging an intractable war in Afghanistan, our government is now supporting Saudi air attacks in Yemen and our Congress is hedging on whether to approve a U.S.-Iran nuclear deal.
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May 11, 2015
Outside a drugstore in the Port Authority Bus Terminal, Bernice McCann found a woman sitting among a cluster of bags. The woman’s hands had deep gashes cut by the cold New York City winter. McCann applied ointment to them, massaged them gently and bandaged the wounds. She is a grandmother, and the woman was old enough to be one too. All along they talked. McCann told the woman how beautiful she was, which is what she tells all the street people she meets on...
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May 4, 2015
The day is almost here: the beatification of Oscar Romero. Thirty-five years after his martyrdom, hordes of pilgrims will descend on El Salvador on May 23 to honor Romero’s life and witness. The archbishop of San Salvador was a “sign of contradiction” in every sense of the phrase, from the theological to the political to the commonsensical, and his devotees include many...
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May 4, 2015
Editor’s Note: In “Why Go to Mass?” (4/13), Mary Ann Walsh, R.S.M., wrote, “To evoke lively conversations, ask why so many Catholics no longer go to Mass.” We did that, and because of the volume of responses, this week’s Reply All is dedicated to that topic.
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April 27, 2015
There are huge risks to talking about women, qua women, in the church. Let me count the ways: generalizing, stereotyping, demeaning, ignoring marginalized women in favor of the privileged, putting women up on a pedestal in order to get them out of the way, ignoring history, shortchanging men and, let’s not forget, plain old getting it wrong.
So forgive me for veering in any of these directions while trying mightily to avoid...
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April 6, 2015
Almost 15 years ago, St. John Paul II surprised the Catholic world by introducing a new set of mysteries to the Rosary. In case you’re unfamiliar with the tradition, there are certain events from the lives of Mary and Jesus that you can meditate on as you recite the Rosary. First are the joyful mysteries, like the Annunciation and the Visitation; then the sorrowful mysteries, like the Crucifixion; and finally, the glorious mysteries, like the Assumption of...
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March 30, 2015
Every day our attention is caught by stories in the news. Usually, the thoughts they occasion are fleeting. Sometimes the impression is more long lasting and they linger for days. One such story for me is that of the three schoolgirls in Britain who on Feb. 17 left their comfortable middle-class lives to fly off to Turkey and from there make their way to Syria to join the Islamic State.
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March 23, 2015
One night William Stringfellow dreamed that he was stabbed with a knife on 125th Street in Harlem, at the hands of a black man who had asked him for a light. Stringfellow then lived in Harlem not far from there. He was a white man who graduated from Harvard Law School and, in 1956, promptly put his training to use in the streets. He was doing his part. Yet it was clear to him in the dream, he later wrote, that “the murder was retribution.” Further: “No white man is innocent.”