The poet-novelist-playwright Thomas Bernhard 1931-89 had much to be miserable about He was born out of wedlock to an Austrian carpenter who never acknowledged him and committed suicide in 1940 and a maidservant who promptly passed him on to her father a minor writer named Johannes Freumbichle

ldquo We don rsquo t care about your future You rsquo re an inmate and all inmates are the same rdquo Such were the bleak words of a prison official addressed to Michael Santos who is serving time in a federal facility The official a ldquo unit manager rdquo was angry with him for writing

In The Language of God Francis Collins has written more of an apologia for his personal religious beliefs than an argument for religious belief itself Were Collins not one of the leading scientists in the world having directed the International Human Genome Project which successfully completed m

In the more than 40 years since Vatican II the short document on the relationship of the Catholic Church to other religions Nostra Aetate has emerged as especially important Its section on the Jewish people suggests that mutual understanding and appreciation can best be furthered by biblical and

In November 1949 the year after the publication of his bestselling autobiography The Seven Storey Mountain Thomas Merton dropped a note to his old college friend Robert Lax about the latest news from the Abbey of Gethsemani quot People keep writing from India we should start a monastery there

The cosmos of natural science today moves on a scale unimaginable to ancient prophets evangelists and makers of creeds Many thoughtful people have now concluded that the universe has outgrown the biblical God who is said to be its creator To them the content of Christian faith seems hopelessly in