Blogs
In two recent articles in Forbes Magazine, Mr. Jerry Bowyer has taken Pope Francis to task not for his economics as such but for supporting his “lefty” economics (Bowyer’s word not mine) with bad biblical exegesis. His first article (March 13, 2013), IsJorge Bergoglio, The New Pope Francis, A Capitalist?, demonstratesBowyer’s concern with Pope Francis’s reading of the figure of Zacchaeus in Luke 19:1-10.
In a forceful speech at the National Defense University today, President Barack Obama sought to interrupt the possibility of an America trapped in a “perpetual war” footing in its struggle against homegrown and international terrorism. Calling for a comprehensive anti-terror strategy that would reduce the use of military force and protect soft power foreign aid packages, the president sought a better balance between security and civil liberties, including protecting the human rights even of enemy combatants.
In an hour-long speech Thursday afternoon, President Barack Obama laid out his policies toward global terrorism. He touched on revoking the war powers passed in the wake of 9/11, on drone warfare as a method of defense, on the potentially negative impact of an unending state of war on U.S. civil liberties, and on the need to close the prison for alleged terrorists at Guantanamo.
America associate editor Kerry Weber recently spoke to a group of young adults on a "Charis retreat" for young adults in New York City. Listen to an actual young adult talk to other actual young adults! It's a great, lively, and spirited talk that involves car chases.
On Monday May 20th, Secretary of State John Kerry released the annual Religious Freedom Report for 2012. It was grim reading. An Annual report on the state of religious freedom around the world is required by Congress' International Religious Freedom Act of 1998. It follows recommendations submitted to the State Department by the independent United States Commission on International Religious Freedom
All Saints Day, 1950, was properly joyful in Korea. U.S. Army Chaplain Father Emil Kapaun celebrated four field Masses that day for the soldiers in the Third Battalion of the Eighth Calvary Regiment. Camped almost on the Chinese boarder, the men believed the war all but won. All Souls is a somber day, and, that year in Korea, it turned cataclysmic as twenty thousand Chinese soldiers entered the war, quickly overwhelming the three thousand Americans posted in the north. So badly outnumbered, GIs recall that aiming one’s weapon was almost superfluous.
Today the Catholic Book Club begins its discussion of Tenth of December by George Saunders. Thanks to those who have already posted questions on the Catholic Book Club page. Thanks, too, to George Saunders, who graciously answered our questions about his book and about the art of fiction. Here, again, are some reflections and questions to guide our discussion:
The Gosnell trial unmasked the horrific violence of abortion and the terrible exploitation of poor women that often comes with it. It reminded us of what abortion is…the destruction of babies before, and now in some documented cases, after they are born.
After the Minister General of the Order of Friars Minor (the Franciscans), José Rodriguez Carballo, OFM, was named secretary of the Congregation for Religious, a new Minister General -- the leader of the tens of thousands Franciscan friars worldwide and the successor to St. Francis of Assisi -- needed to be elected to fill out the rest of Carballo's six-year term.
Speaking on behalf of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, the chairman of the USCCB's Committee on International Justice and Peace said the Obama administration's policy of targeted killings by drones raise “serious moral questions,” including concerns related to discrimination, imminence of threat, proportionality and probability of success. Bishop Richard E.