We are now a few weeks into the Chinese New Year (a year of the Tiger, elementally specified as metal, metaphysically specified as yang), and this seems a fairly auspicious time to pay tribute to one of my favorite of Chinese culture’s immortals … Continue Reading »
The Senate version of health-care reform currently being forced ahead by congressional leaders and the White House is a bad bill that will result in bad law. It does not deserve, nor does it have, the support of the Catholic bishops of our country. Nor does the American public want it. As I write this column on March 14, the Senate bill remains gravely flawed… . Continue Reading »
So the Vatican’s chief exorcist insists that the joint is demon-possessed. Father Gabriele Amorth, 85, who has been the Vatican’s chief exorcist for 25 years and says he has dealt with 70,000 cases of demonic possession, said that the consequences of satanic infiltration included power struggles at the Vatican … . Continue Reading »
Eric Rohmer, leading director of the French New Wave, died in January at age 89. During a career that spanned fifty years, he gained international acclaim and some box-office success. But he died having been loved for the wrong reasons… . Continue Reading »
For centuries, the Hippocratic Oath, including the admonition against abortion, assisted suicide, and euthanasia, formed the core of Western medical ethics. While the Hippocratic ideal has been eroding for decades, the most direct challenge has emerged in the Netherlands, with the cultural and legal acceptance of the right to die… . Continue Reading »
Whenever we process information, interpret an experience, or organize our actions, we do so within the context of existing intellectual knowledge abstractions”schemas. Schema theory has been developed within the field of psychology in an attempt to explain how these cognitive knowledge structures are derived from personal experience and how they are organized in memory… . Continue Reading »
In a scene in the Oscar-nominated film An Education, an older British man with designs on a precocious teenage girl concocts a story for her parents about how he is taking her to visit his old professor, C.S. Lewis. Although Lewis does not figure further in the film, this is a pivotal moment… . Continue Reading »
Sociologist Christian Smith began his ambitious, multivolume effort to plumb the religious lives of Americans across the life course in his 2005 with Soul Searching: The Religious and Spiritual Lives of American Teenagers. In that book”aimed at an audience that the author hoped would include general readers as well as clergy and scholars”Smith painted an incisive portrait of religion among America’s adolescents… . Continue Reading »
You will often hear Jews say, with pride, that Judaism rejects a missionary or evangelizing stance. This is true in the narrow sense that Jews do not pursue converts to Judaism, but it is deeply misleading in another… . Continue Reading »
A couple of years ago, I received a phone call from a theologian named Chris Baglow, whom I didn’t know. He told me that he had just completed the first draft of a textbook on science and religion for use in Catholic schools and colleges and wanted to know if I’d be interested in taking a look at it. A textbook on science and religion? … . Continue Reading »
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