The welfare reform law of 1996 comes up for reauthorization by Congress a year from now. When enacted, it represented an end to the three-decades-old entitlement to public assistance for poor Americans, who have subsequently been pushed toward work in the expectation that they would become self-suff

The bitter grievances that many in the poor nations have against the rich nations produced two explosions last month, one actual and one figurative. The terrorist attacks on Sept. 11 were as real as death. The quarrels that nearly blew up the United Nations Conference on Racism amounted to a symboli

The United States is going to wage a war against terrorists, says President George W. Bush. Is this a just war according to the principles of the Catholic just war theory? For this issue we asked experts in the just war theory to examine this question and present their views.Before looking at the U.

Faced with the enormity of suffering and evil that we have seen in the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, it is impossible to find words that are adequate to comprehend it. When we search for words to deal with this tragedy, we quickly find ourselves at a loss. In the face

Shock, denial, anger and depression swept the country on Sept. 11 as the nation watched thousands of civilians and military people viciously murdered by terrorists. Not since Pearl Harbor has the United States suffered such a devastating attack on its soil, and the number of dead exceeds those kille

This year is the 50th anniversary of the United Nations Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees—a body of international law aimed at ensuring the rights of people fleeing persecution and civil unrest. Overshadowing the celebratory note appropriate to such an occasion, however, is the fac

In a speech to the nation televised from his Texas ranch on Aug. 9, President Bush discussed a moral question that for the past several months has preoccupied both him and many of his fellow citizens: should federal taxpayer dollars be used for research on stem cells that have been derived from livi

However generous individual Americans may be toward those in need, as a nation we do not rank high when it comes to providing development assistance to poor and hungry people in other lands. This is one of the observations made by the Washington, D.C.-based Bread for the World Institute in its annua

The New York Times has as much enthusiasm for President Bush as Mr. Creakle, the headmaster of Salem House, had for that wholly unpromising schoolboy, David Copperfield. The Times’s editorials regularly register their disfavor with Mr. Bush’s domestic and foreign policies. What about the

Immigration law has long been a specialty in which relatively few lawyers, members of Congress and even federal judges have true expertise. In 1996 Congress greatly increased the complexities of this body of law by enacting two statutes: the Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act (AEDPA), and