One challenge for readers of Mother Teresa: Come Be My Light, the collection of Blessed Teresa of Calcuttas letters, is to distinguish among the terms darkness, dryness, desolation, doubt, disbelief, depression and despair - the seven Ds.

I m not sure what I like the most the name of the website gloria tv their in-your-face slogan the more catholic the better their spokesnun she with the arbitrary binoculars the impressively multilingual comments Bei so sch nem Gesang wird die Fastenzeit richtig s or the mus

News has come of the murder of the Chaldean Archbishop of Mosul Paulos Faraj Rahho who had been kidnapped The Associated Press has this story AP And Catholic News Service is running this interview with an American-based Chaldean bishop who lays some of the blame for the outcome on the

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