When Pope Benedict XVI was elected, and celebrated his inaugural Mass last year, I was in India. Later I visited Thailand and Laos. In all three countries the events in Rome were well covered in the local mediaperhaps less thoroughly in Laosthough only about 1 percent of the populations of these cou
Forty-some years ago, at the baptism of our fourth infant son, I murmured a half-serious doubt to a fellow graduate student, Should the church really be baptizing babies without their awareness? One month later this question came back with a vengeance, when on my 28th birthday I discovered our baby
I stepped out of my small room at the Maryknoll Center House in Tokyo and turned to walk down the hall. In the dim light I could make out three figures kneeling on the floor just before the entrance to the stairwell, eyes closed:two Filipino women and one Filipino man, deep in prayer. The next morni
Political liberals seem to have learned one lesson from the 2004 elections: Values, especially religious values, matter to the American people. There is a rush on to deny the religious right the moral high ground. Last year God’s Politics (HarperCollins), by Jim Wallis, the founder of Sojourne
Up So High
To say I have been profoundly moved by Nourishing Head and Heart, by Walter J. Burghardt, S.J., (3/20) is an understatement. Not since John Powell’s ministry lit a spiritual fire in me in the 1970’s has a Jesuit knocked me so flat and raised me up so high! If Walter
With the February election of René Préval as its new president, Haiti, poorest of countries in the Western Hemisphere, may now have some chance to move into the future with greater hope for peace and economic advancement. Although the election itself was marred by irregularities, Mr. Préval was c
Sitio. I thirst (John 19:28). This is the shortest of Jesus’ sayings from the cross, but it says everything. Dehydration from sweating, bleeding, shock, asphyxia and acidosis produced a thirst beyond all telling. To contemplate that thirst is to go to the heart of the paschal mystery, the culm