It isn rsquo t every day that I come upon a word that I don rsquo t know nbsp Not that I rsquo m some sort of super-genius or a wordsmith like the late William Safire or even a crossword puzzle maven who finishes the Sunday Times rsquo puzzle in ink nbsp I can barely finish it in pencil nb

An unusually long astute nbsp and searching pastoral letter from Mark Coleridge archbishop of Canberra and Goulborn in Australia on sexual abuse nbsp He lists several factors among others behind the abuse Oslash nbsp One factor was a poor understanding and communication of the Church rsqu

We were able to snag a preview copy of the new HBO drama The Special Relationship airing nbsp this Saturday which stars Michael Sheen as again Tony Blair and Dennnis Quaid as Bill Clinton nbsp The show looks at the complicated political and personal relationship between the two with a stand

Grant Gallicho over at Dotcommonweal--in response to Bill Donohue s having apparently convinced himself that the sex abuse crisis is about gay priests--provides a master class in analyzing the John Jay study data Yet Donohue thinks that because 81 percent of the victims were male the real cause wa

One of our favorite new film reviewers is John Anderson who has already appeared several times in our Culture section online and in print and reviews regularly for the New York Times Arts amp Leisure Section and Variety His review of Ridley Scott s new film Robin Hood starring Russell Crowe

The following is the text of a letter sent to members of Congress on May 19 from the USCCB on the topic nbsp of the Employment Nondiscrimination Act ENDA and in relation to that same-sex marriage May 19 2010 Dear Member of Congress We write to you regarding the Employment Nondiscrimination

In a provocative op-ed this morning in the New York Times the Dalai Lama speaks of his 1968 encounter with Thomas Merton and the need for religions to highlight what unites us nbsp Interestingly Merton is often nbsp criticized by some Catholics for not being sufficiently Catholic towards the

One of 19 U S women s religious orders specifically nbsp identified as the next step in the Vatican s Apostolic Visitation the Adrian Dominican Sisters of Adrian Michigan are being investigated nbsp The story is outlined in this piece from the Detroit Free Press They ve taught legions of De

The Lives of Jack LondonJames L. HaleyBasic Books. $29.95For those who know Jack London only from their high school days, that is, as a writer of supposedly “young-adult” tales like the novel The Call of the Wild or the supreme short story “To Build a Fire,” this riveting bio

nbsp Normally I don t blog about articles in the Culture section in the print edition but I want to draw your attention to an online slide show of the work of Jonathan Alpeyrie a prominent photographer who in December of 2009 visited the remote monastery of Kintsvisi in Georgia nbsp We fit a