As Jim Lehrer, after 90 minutes of deadly evenhandedness, brought the first presidential debate to a conclusion, I couldn’t escape the fancy that this political campaign was a new television show called, Who Wants to Be a Presidential Survivor? I’m not even sure my idea is original, so f

The patient. At a Mercy Hospital in the Midwest, Steven Becker, a 28 year-old husband and father, lies in what is called a persistent vegetative state (P.V.S.) brought on six months ago when a cyst cut off blood in his brain. In the absence of advance directives, a hospital ethics committee recommen

When you have a party, invite the poor. I have been asked, now and then, how someone might vote from the perspective of Gospel values, Christian values, Catholic values. Usually, I demur, not because I am reluctant to answer, but because I don’t think such questions are really serious. If I sa

When Ralph Nader won the Green Party’s nomination for president, The Saint Louis Post Dispatch gave the event 12 inches on the second page. They allotted Nader a tiny picture, symbolic of the 3 percent support vote he received, as they noted under his face. A heading for the article ran: &quot

If you have seen news articles or television reports on stem cells and the ethical puzzles they present, you may wonder what all the fuss is about. There are at least two things you can be sure of: There will be more wonder, and there will be more fuss. The wonder is related to their origin and thei

I have resisted writing about the Elián González story for four months. Maybe it was the disproportionate amount of attention given to one child in the sea of this world’s suffering. I bristled with the thought that we have little concern for the kids of Iraq, the children of Haiti or the po

The most challenging, the most distressing and yet the most strangely consoling book I have read this year is Annie Dillard’s For the Time Being. It is many things: a string of knotty episodes, a litany of loss, a catalogue of catastrophe, a cry for meaning. Crisscrossing the stories of wise r

"I’m pro-life." Simple as that. At least according to presidential candidate George Bush. But this simple sentence has become as empty as its opposite formulations, "I’m pro-choice," or "I’m for a woman’s right to choose."The contents of these sl

Father Bill Foley, a Jesuit pediatrician who lives down the hall from me, has often struck me as one of the most intrepid men I’ve known. Even when he proposed to me that I accompany him and six others on a journey to Iraq over the Christmas holidays, I was somewhat awestruck by his boldness a

'A time to offend and be offended.' There were two groups conspicuously absent from the State of the Union Address, 2000. The first was nine Supreme Court justices. Our most judicious body seems to have had a case of the collective flu. The other absent group was third-trimester unborn human