A Report From Los AngelesAnyone lamenting the health of the Catholic Church would have been cheered by this year’s Los Angeles Religious Education Congress, the largest Catholic convention in the country, held every year since 1967. This year’s gathering attracted nearly 40,000 pastoral

The current scandal of sexual abuse at a juvenile facility in Texas is but one example of a phenomenon that has long been a dark underside of the U.S. prison systemthe rape of prisoners. The Texas case involves the abuse of youths by staff members at a state-run school. But nationally the abuse has

Noahs DinosaursDuring eight days last September, 16-year-old Matthew LaClair carried a concealed tape recorder to his 11th-grade American history class at Kearny High School in Kearny, N.J. He recorded any comments about religion made by his teacher, 38-year-old David Paszkiewicz. Matthew, whose fam

In the long march of freedom, revolutions one day are blocked by counterrevolutions that shift the aim of government from liberty to order. England’s Glorious Revolution was followed by the restoration of the British monarchy, and the French Revolution by the conservative Concert of Europe. Fo

The 12 jurors responsible for deciding the fate of I. Lewis Libby Jr., former chief of staff for Vice President Dick Cheney, faced a perplexing task. Mr. Libby was charged with obstruction of justice, lying to federal agents and perjuring himself before a grand jury during an investigation to determ

An Anglican Schism? Rowan Williams, the archbishop of Canterbury, faces an almost impossible challenge. Last week in Tanzania, a gathering of three dozen Anglican bishops rebuked their American branch, the Episcopal Church, for supporting gay clergy; consecrating Bishop V. Gene Robinson, an openly g

Possibilities of DiplomacyFor some observers who take a dim view of the Bush administration’s foreign policy record, the most encouraging aspect of the recent agreement reached with North Korea concerning its nuclear program was the negative reaction of John R. Bolton, the ham-handed former U.

"The shelters are full, transitional housing is very limited, and [so is] permanent housing that is affordable on local transportation routes. Such, according to the U.S. Conference of Mayors’ recent survey of homelessness in 23 cities, is the bleak situation in Charleston, S.C. But what is tr

A Target TongueI am not anti-gun, I’m pro-knife, declared Molly Ivins, extolling the knife’s ability to increase physical fitness: You have to catch up with someone in order to stab him. A straight shooter (despite her professed choice of weapons) with accurate aim, Ivins could also writ

In their accounts of the divine creation, the mysterious opening pages of the Bible twice indicate that the work men and women do is neither a penalty nor a curse but an essential human experience toward which these creatures were naturally oriented even before the Fall. In the first chapter of Gene