In Trenton, not too long ago, not far from the State of New Jersey government buildings, by the Delaware River, I was in a lovely old stone church, beautiful inside, the oldest Catholic Church in that state, as its good Pastor, Msgr. Leonard Toomey told me. Sacred Heart, as I looked it up, dates from … Read more
What is striking about scripture, often, I think, is its sense that what we have is first given to us. Isaiah, for instance, will say, “The Spirit of the Lord is given to me…” (61, 1). Paul will say to the Thessalonians, not merely that they should “think before they do anything” — which seems … Read more
After he referred to St. Francis of Assisi and Social Darwinism in his eloquent address to the Democratic Convention in San Francisco, Governor Mario Cuomo was briefly interviewed by Larry King on KCBS. King remarked on the reference to St. Francis. Cuomo then went on to G.K. Chesterton’s comment that St. Francis may have been … Read more
The implications are as great as at any time since deterrence was developed in the 1950s. One of the curiosities of the current presidential campaign is that it has yet to catch fire (do pardon the expression) around the issue of nuclear weapons and nuclear strategy. The democrats profess faith in the freeze, and disbelief … Read more
In “The Wasteland,” T . S. Eliot wrote: There is not even silence in the mountain, But dry, sterile thunder without rain. Where we live, in large part, influences how we look at the natural phenomena which are so much an often unnoticed part of our daily lives — such things as wind, rain, floods, … Read more
New York Senator Roscoe Conkling, a scion of the Gilded Age, is not ordinarily remembered in American history as a moral philosopher. But his gloss on a more-famous critique if patriotism is worth recalling: “When Dr. Johnson said that ‘Patriotism is the last refuge of a scoundrel,’ he overlooked the possibilities of Reform.” Conkling’s complaint, … Read more
At least five hierarchies (the German, US, Dutch, French, and Irish) have thought it advisable in the past year to make a statement on the morality of nuclear war and the issues surrounding it. Basil Cardinal Hume of London also wrote a very perceptive letter on this topic.’ The Irish statement was written after the … Read more
“In Christianity, however, the human soul is not the seeker but the sought,” C. S. Lewis wrote in his Studies in Medieval and Renaissance Literature. “It is God who seeks, who descends from the other world to find and heal man.” Sometimes we have a picture of the world in which each of us works … Read more
In view of the evidence of continuing controversy in Congress, the academic community, and in the structure of public opinion, it is strikingly odd that Justice Powell insists so strongly in his recent opinion for the Court in Akron v. Akron Center for Reproductive Health that the “basic principle that a woman has a fundamental … Read more
