I sit at lessons and carols for the second time, listening to St. Luke’s account of the Annunciation while a baby kicks and swims inside me. The church is candlelit and hushed, fragrant with pine boughs, nothing like the small, hot room where a Middle Eastern Jewish teenager learned from an an
Four years ago, after the newly elected President George W. Bush’s inaugural address, 40 million people were without health care coverage in our nation. At that time, the Catholic Health Association of the United States called for a series of reforms and a sharing of responsibility for health
Delivering a hot meal to an elderly woman in a public housing project is how my Saturday afternoons begin. Her meal and hundreds of others are prepared in the basement of a Manhattan church. Most are eaten right there, but enough are set aside to accommodate shut-ins as part of a program informally
Welcome Advance
Brian D. Scanlan’s forthright account (11/1) of wholesome boyhood experiences in the company of an aging priest was a welcome relief from the depressing lore we have painfully endured regarding boy-priest relationships these past years. His memories do not clamor for
Out today, back behind bars tomorrow: high rates of recidivism remain one of the most troubling aspects of our criminal justice system. Referring to released prisoners, President George W. Bush noted in his State of the Union speech in 2004 that we know from long experience that if they can’t
I prayed over a dead man today. His name was Jocelyn, and he had only one leg. His other leg had been amputated “not too long ago due to complications from sugar,” said the man in the adjacent bed. That man’s legs had both been amputated at the knees. I guessed Jocelyn had been in
A pioneering 20th-century stage and opera director Margaret Webster challenged not only stage tradition but also mainstream attitudes toward professional women A creative force in the United States and Great Britain Webster is credited with bringing Shakespeare to Broadway Her bold casting of Pau