'A time to offend and be offended.' There were two groups conspicuously absent from the State of the Union Address, 2000. The first was nine Supreme Court justices. Our most judicious body seems to have had a case of the collective flu. The other absent group was third-trimester unborn human

Pope Plans to Canonize Blessed Katharine DrexelPope John Paul II plans to canonize Blessed Katharine Drexel (1859-1955), the U.S. heiress who dedicated her life to defending and educating African Americans and Native Americans. During a meeting with the Congregation for Sainthood Causes on Jan. 27,

The front-page photos were an editor's delight. In one, a man kissed the locked doors of the Holy Sepulchre. In another, a pilgrim knelt in prayer before them. In a third, an Austrian nun, excluded from the Basilica of the Nativity, wept in Bethlehem's Manger Square as Palestinian police loo

Chinese Ordain Five Bishops Without Vatican ApprovalThe government-approved church in China ordained five new bishops without papal approval. The ordination ceremony took place on Jan. 6, just hours before Pope John Paul II ordained 12 bishops in St. Peter’s Basilica in Rome. Church officials

Tell me what seminaries and schools of theology are really like these days. How many students attend? Who are the faculty members, and do they enjoy their work? From what background do students come, and how do they approach their formation and education? What is their vision for future ministry? Si

It is difficult to imagine a more complex and challenging literary life for a biographer than that of Samuel Taylor Coleridge After completing a brief critical biography of Coleridge some 25 years ago as a quot trial run quot for a full-length life Walter Jackson Bate concluded ruefully quot I

If this book sold only 535 copies and each found its way into the hands of a member of the U S Senate and House of Representatives it would be a great publishing success Bookstore browsers may be deterred by the rather ambitious subtitle quot How the Coming Age Wave Will Transform Americaand th

"End detention as we know it": This was the goal presented at the beginning of the third annual Detention Watch Network conference on Nov. 25-28 in Baltimore, Md. Using the phrase in satiric imitation of Bill Clinton’s 1992 campaign promise to restructure welfare, James Haggerty, an

In my last column, on "millennial moralists" (which yielded a few friendly complaints and started a few arguments, I’m told), I promised a prognostication of 10 ethical challenges for the next thousand years. It didn’t take long to realize how foolhardy such a proposal might be

With a little bit of luck we can trace a certain recent huffing and puffing to a distinguished corps of papal observers desperately striving to keep abreast since 1995 of the spate of lengthy and weighty biographies of Pope John Paul II. More than one Vaticanist has taken great and vicarious pleasur