nbsp nbsp nbsp nbsp I was asked recently to serve on the advisory board of nbsp California Interfaith Power and Light one of 36 state branches which sponsor as part of a national network religious responses to global warming due to deforestation gross energy inefficiencies glacial meltin

nbsp nbsp nbsp nbsp nbsp I finally got around to reading the spiritual classic The Cloud of Unknowing Over the years from time to time I dipped into it but had never read it carefully contemplatively I was moved to do so by seeing a new translation of the classic by Carmen Acevedo Butche

I have usually entertained some ambiguity if not cynicism about New Year s resolutions.

John DiIulio jr s excellent and quite laudatory review of Robert Putnam and David Campbell s recent book American Grace How Religion Divides and Unites Us which appeared in the Nov 22nd issue of America summed up his judgment American Grace is an instant classic as academically authoritativ

I attended in mid-October in Rome at the Pontifical Council of Justice and Peace a quite spirited three-day symposium on the topic of Caritas ihn Veritate and the American Church and Society Besides the Pontifical Council of Justice and Peace the meeting was co-sponsored by the Institute for

Jesuit playwright Bill Cain S J has penned a new and searingly powerful play Just a year after his earlier successful play about the gun powder plot Equivocation see my review Cain portrays in his new play 9 Circles a character Daniel Reeves as a disturbed 19-year old snarled in the web o

Living as I do in San Francisco along the coast I remain deeply curious how high the sea rise is likely to be between now and 2100 I have a cousin who recently bought a house in our Marina district I kid that he may have to move to higher ground before too many years pass Reading a new book by

This year world-wide celebrations commemorate the 400th anniversary of the death of Matteo Ricci the remarkable Italian Jesuit pioneer of cross-cultural understanding who opened China to the west and vice versa Ricci and the early Jesuit missionaries fostered a notion of salvific globalization