Our church and society stand in need of renewed and sustained discussion regarding an ethic of life. Serious conversation has largely devolved into sloganeering and sound bites. The prevailing metaphor, culture of life versus culture of death, has galvanized people’s imaginations and inspired

As a new academic year begins, generalizations about American Catholic elementary and secondary education are risky, because there are signs both of losses and gains. Losses because with the closing of many financially strapped schools the system is smaller than it once was. Forty years ago, the pop

The citizens of the United States must insist that our leaders confront with uncompromising honesty the fault lines of American society revealed by the damage wrought by Katrina.

When world leaders gathered at the United Nations five years ago to promulgate their Millennium Declaration, they pledged their nations to a global partnership aimed at cutting extreme poverty in half by 2015. Two years later they met again in Monterrey, Mexico, to develop a framework for undertakin

Abusive labor practices continue to plague workers here and around the worlda circumstance that should give pause to those fortunate enough to earn comfortable incomes for themselves and their families. For many it may come as a surprise that even here in the United States, worker exploitation is pe

In the final week of July 2005, a month darkened by terrorist violence in London, the Irish Republican Army officially declared an end to its armed campaign to eliminate British rule in Northern Ireland. The time had come, the I.R.A. statement said, to pursue a political and democratic path to a uni