One of the better blogs on things religious is Therese Borchard s Beyond Blue hosted by Beliefnet com Nominally it is about the topic of depression which Borchard had suffered from and also discussed in last week s America article Shadows in Prayer Shadows More broadly it i

Christ the Lord The Road to Cana Anne Rice s new novel received if not a rave review then a very positive one in The New York Times this morning Times review The book is a follow-up to Christ the Lord Out of Egypt her bestselling novel about the birth and childhood of Jesus That fi

As an example of how the media sometimes can get a story wrong or at least confuse things unnecessarily witness the story from the March 8 issue of L Osservatore Romano which included an entirely sensible interview with Bishop Gianfranco Girotto an official at the Apostolic Penitentiary on

More sartorial commentary Keith Pecklers S J has a provocative article in the latest London Tablet on Pope Benedict s return to some of the more formal vesture of the church Father Pecklers is Professor of Liturgy at the Pontifical Gregorian University and Professor of Liturgical History a

Okay okay I know that this is somewhat inside-baseball but I also know that there are several readers who are interested in things Jesuit and also not a few Jesuits who read this blog and even more who read the mag In any event as the General Congregation winds down here is something t

Word has come from an anonymous but reliable source that on Tuesday of this Holy Week the corner of Fourth and Walnut Streets in Louisville familiar to any fan of Thomas Merton will be named Merton Square It was there that Merton in 1958 stopping in town for a visit to his physician s

Do you read The Anchoress That s the nom de blog of one of the more literate and more lively Catholic writers scribbling in the blogosphere Sure she may not be what some of our St Louis Jesuit-loving F J-friendly Catholic Worker Jesuit-educated readers might be used to from our ma

Walter M Abbott S J the New England province Jesuit and former associate editor of America probably best known for his work in editing The Documents of Vatican II a book that for many years remained the standard compilation of the writings of the Council died this morning He had lived f

Here are the things I m reminded of every year at the LA Religious Education Congress--which ended today with a lively Mass celebrated by Roger Cardinal Mahony--and which I sometimes forget during the rest of the year First The Catholic church is alive because the People of God are alive with

If you haven t seen it already here s Fr Jim Martin s oped in today s New York Times praising the Vatican s recent directive calling for greater rigor in its own saint-making process Among Fr Jim s recommendations for a further tightening up of the process Officials could re