Very slowly the American public is moving away from the death penalty A recent Gallup Poll puts its acceptance at 63 percent down from 80 percent in 1994 Unfortunately according to a survey by the Institute for Policy Research and Catholic Studies at the Catholic University of America Catholic

'You Will Be My Son' raises morals issues that we could talk about for years.

nbsp ldquo Nowhere in the pages of history can be found a greater champion of justice Return with us now to those thrilling days of yesteryear From out of the past come the thundering hoofbeats of the great horse Silver The Lone Ranger rides again quot By now everyone who cares at all about t

Recently Ethan Bonner the longtime Israel correspondent for the New York Times who also had a son in the Israeli army returned to his old turf for a wedding celebration in Tel Aviv and was struck by how the old discussion about ldquo Israel in crisis rdquo had disappeared Everyone sang and dan

Last Sunday in Aleppo a 14-year old boy Muhammad al-Quatta was selling coffee in his kiosk when he was overheard refusing a customer a free cup with a cheeky refusal that even if Muhammad peace be upon him were to come to earth he would not get a cup of coffee unless he paid for it Three long-b

In 2010 the film critic Roger Ebert told Esquire: “All is well. I am as I should be.”

Barack Obama has changed About six years ago I stood two feet away from him in the St Peter rsquo s College Jersey City Gym which he had rented for a campaign rally and watched him deal one by one with the crowd that squeezed around him and told myself that maybe this was the one we had been wa

Every once in a while there rsquo s a break in the bad news about the church The good news for several weeks has been the election of Cardinal Bergoglio of Argentina as pope His is a kind and fresh face of an elderly man with a heart and his symbolic gestures suggest that this new face may repres

In 1981 when I was training at 48 for my first marathon mdash the New York mdash a man I had just met told me ldquo Once you run your first marathon you will never be the same again There are two kinds of people in the world those who have run a marathon and those who have not rdquo He w

Because I often don rsquo t get to read the Times until late at night I learned of the New York Times rsquo legendary op-ed columnist Anthony Lewis rsquo s death in an email from Chris Keating political reporter for the Hartford Courant whom I had taught journalism at Fordham and who went on to