Theology and Dialogue edited by bruce d. marshall university of notre dame press, 302 pages, $14.95 paper. These “essays in conversation with George Lindbeck” are also essays in deserved celebration of a thinker who has done as much as anyone in the last half-century to advance ecumenical . . . . Continue Reading »
As a notorious critic of Darwinism, I enjoy reading a newsletter called Basis, which is published by an organization calling itself the San Francisco Bay Area Skeptics. These self-styled skeptics take a very dim view of anyone who suggests that the Darwinian theory of evolution might be an . . . . Continue Reading »
Ecclesiastical anarchism has a long history in American Christianity, but few have gone quite as far as James H. Rutz, whose new book, The Open Church, had a prominent advertising spread in World, an evangelical news magazine. To his credit, Rutz has identified some of the glaring . . . . Continue Reading »
In the north Indian state of Bihar, there are indigenous peoples who never converted to the Hinduism of the Aryan people that conquered and settled India long ago. Some of these tribals, as they are called, exist in another century, perhaps another millennium. In one hamlet, there is a well for . . . . Continue Reading »
The Public Square Donahue, Oprah, and Geraldo have all had a grand time weighing in on the subject, and Father Andrew Greeley has been writing up a storm denouncing “the silence” of the Church about it. In the foreword to a new hook, Greeley says that priestly pedophilia is “perhaps the most . . . . Continue Reading »
Starlings may mean more than we supposed,Their ugliness but a guiseHiding beauties too deep to probe.Look how they adorn the barren oak,Mimicking so many black and restless leaves,Remnants, making what to them is musicAgainst a sky whose blue is nearly white,This winter day as still as God’s own . . . . Continue Reading »
The late Sam Kinison, an incomparably loud and invariably offensive comedian, once delivered a comedy routine about famine. He remarked that whenever he sees heart-rending scenes of famine victims he wonders, “How come the film crew didn’t just give the kid a sandwich? How come you never see . . . . Continue Reading »
“Those who deny freedom to others deserve it not for themselves,” wrote Abraham Lincoln. Is there any American of sound mind who would not endorse this statement? Yet things having to do with freedom are not always so clear. The crucial case of religious freedom, celebrated by Pope John Paul II . . . . Continue Reading »
The novelist and critic Mary McCarthy, who died in 1989, was up to the time of her death working on a memoir of her life in the late 1930s, in effect a sequel to her two previous autobiographical works, Memoirs of a Catholic Girlhood and How I Grew. Perhaps she meant by the end . . . . Continue Reading »
Some will protest that the question posed by that title is outrageously wrongheaded. To ask what we should do about the poor, they say, smacks of paternalism and noblesse oblige, reflecting a hierarchical mentality in which, the world is divided between “us” and “them.” Rather, they would . . . . Continue Reading »
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