Alice McDermott rsquo s new novel After This vividly often heart-rendingly portrays roughly 25 years up through 1977 in the lives of the Keane family John and Mary and their four children Jacob Michael Annie and Clare The novel rsquo s Irish-Catholic Long Island milieu will be familiar to

In the highly charged and fertile theological world out of which Vatican II was born there was widespread agreement that the Catholic Church needed to rethink itself Stale Thomistic recitations seemed out of step with emerging ways of looking at Christ the world the liturgy the role of both ord

If asked ldquo Who is Satan rdquo most of us might give an answer something like this Satan or the Devil is the fallen angel who persuaded Adam and Eve to commit the ldquo original sin rdquo Also known as the Antichrist and Lucifer he now presides over hell and entices people on earth to sin

The North Atlantic captivity of the church is drawing to an end The center of Christian gravity is undeniably shifting southward This development is not a blip on the religious radar screen but a profound permutation Globally a major gravitational adjustment is occurring in the population density

Alan Wolfe director of the Boisi Center for Religion and American Public Life at Boston College has written a sharp indictment of the Bush administration and the conservatives who support it Wolfe rsquo s overall interpretive point in Does American Democracy Still Work is that conservatives wh

Although the Bush administration has been in a snit about The New York Times rsquo s recent revelations of government spying on Americans and the surveillance of the banking records of presumed terrorists the president has actually had an easy time of it with the Fourth Estate according to Eric Bo