In the fantasy novel That Hideous Strength, a young social scientist, hoping to break into the inner circle of the prestigious National Institute for Coordinated Experiments (acronym: NICE) discovers that the goal of the institute is to eliminate organic life. Filostrato, a physiologist who hates tr

Ash Wednesday is the most countercultural day of the year. Repent! Turn away from sin! Now what could be more un-American than repentance and the admission of sin? Denial of guilt may be a human problem haunting each conscience and every culture, but we seem to have made a science of it. It is suppo

A great weight was settling on me during Christmas week. There were deaths among friends, Jesuit brothers and family, but the most haunting face of death came with an ocean of destruction called the tsunami. In a matter of hours, it killed over 150,000 people, most of them children. At noon on Jan.

On the weekend before Advent’s onset, CNN ran a special called The Fight Over Faith. At one point in the coverage of the conflict between Bible-believing Christians and secularists, someone, expressing what seems to be a conviction of many of her fellow belivers, professed a strict interpretat

First, a confession: I couldn’t do it. I wanted to vote for one of the two nominees from the dominant parties, but I just could not offer my vote to either. I went for the Green candidate, since he was for universal health care and conservation policies that 20 years from now we will all wish

Four months ago I wrote in this column that I needed some reasons to vote for one of the two big shots in this election. I had voted for a menagerie of candidates in the past 20 years, none of whom won, Ralph Nader being the last. Sensing my implicit request, many readers of America sent me challeng

We made it through the Olympics without it happening. We got through the Democratic National Convention without it. And we’ve survived the Republican convention as well. What is it? Islamofacist Terrorism, if you prefer an incendiary phrase, or Internal Terror, if you are concentrated on the d

For most of us, the legal system seems something far away. We know of lawyers and lawsuits, crime and punishment. The law keeps things going smoothly, maintains order and apparently insures that justice is served. At least apparently. I’ve had the usual contact: parking tickets, traffic violat

I have never before encountered, either in correspondence, after Sunday liturgies or just in casual conversations, such intense concern and confusion over faith and politics as I do nowadays. The issue is abortion. Unlike most of the moral imperatives that Jesus articulates in the Gospel, unlike the

At a recent international congress in Rome on “Life-Sustaining Treatments and the Vegetative State,” Pope John Paul II ignited a controversy that is still smoking. He stated that artificial nutrition and hydration “should be considered, in principle, ordinary and proportionate, and