In this week s New Yorker columnist Michael Kinsley describes what he calls the last competition of his aging boomer generation i e who can live longest and die the best death Read Mine Is Longer Than Yours You win if you can live longer than your peers and stay in good enough health to r

This June our excellent parochial school is being closed after a hundred years My live in granddaughter Perry went there for the last eight years and has just moved to the local public school I am grateful that she had the advantages of Catholic education that sociologists have described these sc

Today in The New York Times a story on the fluid religious life of Americans reports that roughly 10 per cent of all Americans are former Catholics The Roman Catholic Church has lost more adherents than any other group Only the influx of Catholic immigrants have kept the over all numbers of chur

If you want to see how the evolution of doctrine works in practice look up Avery Cardinal Dulles learned article Who Can Be Saved in February s First Things In a succinct and brisk narrative Dulles describes how Christians developed their theological reflections on salvation from scriptura

I love it when I see converging ideas in separate fields In recent work in theology and evolutionary psychology there has been a new emphasis upon the centrality of relationship In Elizabeth A Johnson s wonderful new book on God Quest for the Living God she has a chapter on the Trinity atten

Feminists were made happy on reading two headlines in last Tuesday s New York Times One headline reads Girls Make History by Sweeping Top Honors at a Science Contest The other reports In Iran Group of Mothers Criticizes Nuclear Policy Concerned Iranian women calling themselves M

Our live in grandchild teamed up with my husband and pressured us into acquiring an adorable Cavalier King Charles spaniel puppy Yesterday a Cavalier was pictured in a N Y Times Business section story reporting that there are 44 8 million pet dogs in America Their owners help to support a 38 bi

It is disheartening that America s leaders are arguing over the permissibility of torture and splitting hairs over its definition Water boarding or the near drowning of a prisoner has been defended as an interrogation technique It also seems beyond doubt that U S officials have forcibly hand

Forty-some years ago, at the baptism of our fourth infant son, I murmured a half-serious doubt to a fellow graduate student, Should the church really be baptizing babies without their awareness? One month later this question came back with a vengeance, when on my 28th birthday I discovered our baby

From 1993, Sidney Callahan, a Christian feminist, makes the case for Marian devotion.