I first met James DiGiacomo S J in the mid-70 rsquo s at a national workshop he was leading for the Jesuit Secondary Education Association on adolescent moral development In 2003 he retired from a teaching career that spanned more than five decades His dedication to Catholic religious education

Reading a work by someone you rsquo ve met and whose life and ministry you admirethat inevitably counts as a factor when you sit down to review the person rsquo s first book Happily and objectively I can recommend Deirdre Cornell rsquo s A Priceless View My Spiritual Homecoming to all who find pr

In the debate over poverty in the United States there are just two ideas or at least it often seems that way One is that people are poor because of the system and that any real solutions will have to come from forces outside the individual namely government That is the view from the doctrinaire

In recent decades a growing number of social scientists like Theda Skocpol whose Diminished Democracy I reviewed in this space 10 20 03 have rediscovered the voluntary associations of civil society that flourish in the social space between government agencies and profit-seeking firms Today bus

This is an important book with much to offer but it is also disappointing Its importance lies in three converging factors The first and most obvious is the subject Martin Luther is a person of almost mythic proportions in the history of the West By his prophetic stance he almost single-handed

This book takes its title from an observation made by Thomas Jefferson in 1816 ldquo Old Europe will have to lean on our shoulders and to hobble along by our side under the monkish trammels of priests and kings as she can What a colossus shall we be rdquo Niall Ferguson professor of financia