This year for the first time the same song is competing for the UK Christmas no 1 music slot with a title borrowed from a famous Jewish-Christian exclamation Leonard Cohen s 1984 song Hallelujah exploded into mass consciousness after it was sung by this year s X Factor winner Alex

Don t miss Peter Steinfels appreciation of John O Malley SJ s marvelous new book What Happened at Vatican II in the Times today nbsp Steinfels summarizes O Malley s history of the Council as well as his approach to the widespread continuity vs discontinuity debate nbsp In short

Cambridge MA I return today for a third time to the theme of Krishna in Advent nbsp In my first and second reflections on this theme I highlighted famous verses from Chapter 4 of the nbsp Bhagavad Gita and from the commentary on the verses by the medieval theologian Ramanuja There is a lot go

The hysteria on the Left especially gay rights activists over President-elect Barack Obama rsquo s selection of mega-church pastor Rick Warren to give the invocation at his inaugural ceremony is comic For those who care about the rights of gays and lesbians however the hysteria is also tragic

Critics of the Archbishop of Canterbury who try to dismiss him as a bearded lefty have been confounded by his very public disagreement with the prime minister Gordon Brown over how to respond to the fast-deepening recession In comments yesterday on the flagship BBC news program Today Row

Today toward the end of the funeral Mass for Avery Dulles at Saint Patrick rsquo s Cathedral after the long procession of priests had filed out the front doors onto Fifth Avenue followed at last by Cardinal Egan there was then a hushed pause A beat or two of empty time and then suddenly from n