It is no secret that in the last 40 years there has been a steep decline in the number of clergy working in parishes as well as religious congregations staffing schools and other Catholic institutions In parishes the women and men filling the roles once performed exclusively by clergy and religiou

A generation ago the rock band The Who venerated and mocked their spiritually restless Baby Boomer peers in their song The Seeker bragging that I rsquo ve got values but I don rsquo t know how or why According to a major new study of teenagers and religion spiritual seekers have all but vanished

ldquo But what if Scola becomes pope rdquo Such was my e-mail response to America rsquo s request that I do this book review John Paul II had just died Benedict XVI had yet to be elected And Angelo Cardinal Scola was on the papabile list Needless to say Scola the patriarch of Venice did not

The novelist Michael Cunningham leapt into the spotlight with The Hours 1998 a meditative spinoff of Virginia Woolf rsquo s Mrs Dalloway Cunningham rsquo s book won the Pulitzer Prize and enjoyed a successful second run in a filmed version four years later Now he has written another trio of in

In the aftermath of the great tsunami of late December 2004 there emerged a lively public philosophical and theological debate in the popular media Where was God in this terrible event Why did God allow it to happen What did the victims do to deserve this Did they do anything wrong at all How

With the publication of One Nation Uninsured the Florida State University sociologist Jill Quadagno joins an array of scholars who have sought to account for the failure of national health care in the United States and to explain why we get so little health for our health care expenditure Classic