J. R. R. Tolkien, the Oxford professor of Anglo-Saxon who became famous by inventing the Hobbits, once pointed out that the Gospel story begins and ends on a note of joy. It begins with the birth of Jesus under the stars in Bethlehem, a moment of purest joy, and it ends with his resurrection in the

For those interested in the role that the visual arts have played in the Christian faith these two books are major contributions They are both connected to an important exhibition organized last year by the National Gallery in London entitled Seeing Salvation According to Neil MacGregor the Nati

Nearly 60 years ago an ocean liner from North Africa nudged its way into New York harbor bearing hundreds of exhausted Jewish refugees from Vichy France. Among them was a pale, intense teacher of philosophy with only a year to liveSimone Weil. At that time she was almost unknown outside France. Sinc

Jacques Dupuis is a Belgian Jesuit who taught theology for over 30 years in India before joining the faculty at the Gregorian University in Rome, where we were colleagues during the last decades of my professorship there. His many years in India gave him the experience of being a member of the Chris

Worldwide Hunger Picture Still Bleak, Says Bread for WorldGrim realities about hunger worldwide are detailed in Foreign Aid to End Hunger, a report issued by Bread for the World Institute in Washington. The report urges President Bush and Congress to allocate an additional $1 billion a year in U.S.

Among my most cherished childhood memories are visits to the local branch of Queens Borough Public Library, where peace and quiet reignedexcept for the occasional chair squeaking across the floor, or the loud whisperer, or the crashing book, which violations of the peace were dutifully corrected by

The recent investigation and trial of the theologian Jacques Dupuis, S.J., alerted Catholics and others to the judicial methods of the Vatican Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith (Am., 3/12, Signs of the Times).

Two 18th-century expatriate Catholic priests living in the seminary at Douai in France produced some works that subsequently had a seminal impact on the lives of English-speaking Catholics that endures to this day. Richard Challoner (1691-1781) revised the old Douai-Rheims version of the Bible (orig

This short book advances bone-shattering propositions about the fall of Yugoslavia It argues that U S policymakers and western European leaders knowingly set out to destroy Yugoslavia in the interest of globalized capitalism that the 1999 Rambouillet Peace Agreement was an ambush amounting to o

This short enthusiastic explanation of why and how Catholics should come to know Mary the mother of Jesus through better acquaintance with her types in the Hebrew Scriptures obviously springs from true devotion The author Scott Hahn formerly a Presbyterian minister and now a professor of theolog