The Bush administration’s response to North Korea’s nuclear weapon challenge has been hypocritical. While the North Korean decision to withdraw from the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty last January was lamentable, it is also understandable. The Bush administration itself has done much to

Afriend recently passed on to me an article in which the author, a priest, argues that we need to reromanticize priesthood and religious life and give people something beautiful to fall in love with. I find it to be an inspired idea, given recent revelations and events, and a troubling idea. Rarely

There were lots of unfamiliar faces at Mass that morningvisitors invited to share the day with their friends from the parish. Some of them were not Catholic, though that was hardly a surprise. In my part of the country, the polyglot Northeast, such family-church celebrations rarely are for Catholics

On the Monday holiday honoring Martin Luther King Jr., my two older daughters and I have for some years participated in a march for peace and signed a “Women for Peace” petition. It is a small rite of passage. Those daughters, now in college, signed their way through their formative year

The earliest and most enduring lesson the Jesuits taught me can be summarized in one word: slop. This may take a bit of explaining, but not as much as you might think. For it has to do with learning to find the sacred in the mundane. Other than paper routes, my first real job came in high school, wh

In the days just before Easter, when few people were paying attention, Great Britain’s police commissioner admitted that members of Northern Ireland’s security forces had worked with Loyalist paramilitaries to murder Catholics in the 1980’s. The most prominent victim was Pat Finuca