How long, O Lord, how long? As blood continues to flow, this prayer must be daily on the lips of both Israelis and Palestinians. After two weeks of the latest Israeli military invasion of northern Gaza, more than 90 Palestinians lay dead, hundreds maimed or wounded, most of them civilians. Every day

In a famous essay published in Thought in 1955, Msgr. John Tracy Ellis lamented the lack of intellectual achievement on the part of second- and third-generation American Catholics. Conditions have changed markedly since Ellis wrote. Today Catholics can be found on the faculties of the best American

"No young man believes he shall ever die,” said William Hazlitt, the 19th-century British essayist. That shrewd observation is contradicted in times of war. A 22-year-old machine gunner with a French battalion in Korea in the 1950’s wrote to his father: “In our time, when you

To judge by the presidential campaign, civil discourse in the United States lies exhausted and beaten alongside the campaign trail, a victim of the culture wars. Problems produced by the Iraq war are mounting, and the war remains the nation’s number one issue; but neither the candidates nor th

Tuberculosis is a disease of the poor that thrives in crowded, unsanitary settings. Although it is still found in the United States in prisons and homeless shelters, by the 1980’s it had largely disappeared from the general population in the industrialized countries of the North. But now it ha

No one had to tell the delegates at the fourth annual convention of the Catholic Educational Association that Catholic schools aim to help their students become true Christians. But that is not all they are supposed to do. At the pontifical Mass that opened the meeting, held in Milwaukee, Wis., in J

The debate over Senator John Kerry’s service in the Vietnam War sounded a sour and dispiriting note as the presidential campaign of 2004 approached the Labor Day weekend, the traditional start of the final and most serious phase of the campaign. While President Bush prepared to accept the offi

The American story has been the “story of flawed and fallible people united across the generations by grand and enduring ideals,” said President George W. Bush in his inaugural address of Jan. 20, 2001. The theme of a united people also ran through the keynote speech of Illinois senatori

The disaster unfolding in the Darfur region of Sudan shines a spotlight once again on the plight of refugees and internally displaced persons. The Sudanese government has stood by as Arab Janjaweed militias engaged in the systematic destruction of Darfurian villages and water sources. Thirty thousan

The conventional wisdom about presidential election campaigns is that the American voting public does not begin to pay attention until after the Labor Day weekend. For both Democrats and Republicans the candidates have been clearly identified long in advance of the national conventions in which they