On Nov. 20, 1581, the British Jesuit Edmund Campion, along with two others, was tried and found guilty of high treason. As he refused to abjure his faith or his priesthood, Queen Elizabeth I ordered him to be hanged, drawn and quartered. A man of deep Christian charity and missionary zeal, this mart
Of all the puzzles of existence that challenge our religious ideas, none cause more anguish and more crises of faith than suffering, death and evil. From the dawn of human sensibility these have resisted what Leibnitz called theodicy—vindication of the justice of God. Even today, many thinkers
It was chilling to read, to see the pictures. The Sunday New York Times Magazine of Oct. 21 displayed a pictorial interview with five of Jihad’s Women, associated with one of the 100 Pakistan religious schools for Muslim females. (There are 10,000 such schools for boys in the country.)A woman
Ever since I learned to read, I have wanted to be a fiction writer. The vocation was inchoate at first, for books seem as authorless as rain to a child, but it insisted that I not only inhabit the world imagined by others, as good readers do, but go on with the story, configure it to fit my own life
Anational symposium titled Breaking New Ground in Mission was held in Shillong, India, from July 5 to 9, 2001, in which leading missiologists, pastors and experts participated. At the symposium the conviction was widespread that we cannot have any meaningful discourse on mission evangelization witho
Paterson, N.J., is not a place name likely to strike a chord of recognition in the minds of Americans elsewhere in the country. Literary types might recall that the poet-physician William Carlos Williams had his office there, and that one of his most famous poems is named after this once-prosperous
Different FindingsWhile I agree with the Rev. James Garneau’s basic premise in “More Priestly Fraternity” (10/22) that priests need and deserve communities of support, my own research and other studies on seminaries over the past 20 years would yield different findings on a number