Public apologies are all the rage these days, so much so that it’s hard to find a celebrity or newsmaker who hasn’t visited the high priests of the secular confessional, Larry King and Oprah Winfrey, to beg for forgiveness for some petty offense. But the trend is hardly limited to indivi

More than a quarter-century ago, the Archdiocese of Chicago embarked on what must have seemed a radical idea at the time: catechetical barhopping. Well, that’s probably a bit too glib and irreverent. But it’s also not far from the truth. The program, after all, was called Theology on Tap

As Congress and the President debate the merits of sending 20,000 more troops to Iraq, a very different cohort of 20,000 troops is trying to prepare for life after the war. They are the men and women who have been wounded in action in Iraqmen and women whose bodies may never be whole again, whose mi

Before he took off for a tour of Asia in mid-November, President Bush played host to the leaders of the Big 2.5 American automakersGeneral Motors, Ford and the U.S. half of the multinational conglomerate known as DaimlerChrysler. The automakers had been hoping for an S.U.V.-sized summit conference o

Scott Fappiano spent more than 20 years in prison in New York. He was convicted of a brutal crime in 1985the rape of a woman married to a police officer in Brooklyn. His trial was not exactly open and shut. Although the victim identified Fappiano as her attacker by looking at photographs, he was, in

After watching her autistic son struggle through a difficult school year, Kristina Chew joined the blogosphere in what she calls a moment of desperation. Charlie Fisher, her 9-year-old son, seemed to have stopped making progress. Worse, he was having tantrums, banging his head violently and hurting

If adults were required to compose essays chronicling what they did on their summer vacation, some of us would have no choice but to hand in a blank piece of paper. A recent article in The New York Times reported that about one in four private-sector workers in the U.S. receive no paid vacation time

The columnist Russell Baker once wrote a piece about the discovery he made one evening after he retired to his basement and, with nothing else to do, turned on the television set. All sorts of new and alien life forms invaded the basement. There was, he would write, a country living in his cellara c

Back in the day, when everybody was 12 years oldwell, that’s how it seemed to mewe had a colorful expression designed to convey our undiluted skepticism of a peer’s ill-considered and overly ambitious plans. O.K., we’d say, it’s your funeral. It was a handy way to distance ou

A couple of months ago, I wrote a gloomy, mid-winter’s column about a depressing round of Catholic school closings in and around my home in New Jersey. I referred to the early months of the calendar year as the saddest time of year for many Catholic school students, because often that is when