American Catholics old enough to remember Bishop Fulton J Sheen and his famous chalk talks on televisionsermonettes punctuated by occasional salvos against Communism psychoanalysis and birth controlwill be stunned by how much more worldly engaging and hip apologetics can be in the hands of a maes

In his foreword to Finding the Treasure Within A Woman rsquo s Journey into Preaching the spiritual author Ronald Rolheiser O M I writes We are forever caught up in situations that are less than ideal full of tension and fraught with potential for self-pity and bitterness So what can we

More words are misused in politics than in any other field of human endeavor Radical has come to mean something like extremist through repeated misapplication but it comes from the Latin radix meaning root radical politics is therefore supposed to be just another term for grass-roots activism Mi

For an on-the-ground feel for the Holy Land and the high stakes it holds for the world rsquo s three great religions Judaism Christianity and Islam Bruce Feiler rsquo s book Walking the Bible is the next best thing to being there The journalist-author takes readers on a guided tour of the first

Alice McDermott rsquo s fiction like William Kennedy rsquo s is to be praised if for no other reason than that it transcends the tradition of Irish-American fiction established by James T Farrell back in the 1930 rsquo s Since Studs Lonigan first swaggered onto the literary stage Irish-America

A few years ago the Episcopal bishop of Newark John Shelby Spong penned a book entitled Why Christianity Must Change or Die Spong argued that Christianity would inevitably decline unless it abandoned much of its traditional belief system A few decades hence we may regard Spong rsquo s prediction