“Come sit over here,” my wife whispered to me. “Let’s give Dad a chance to be alone with her.” It was a quiet room in a hospice, the only sounds the muffled pumping of oxygen, and the softer and slower breathing of my mother-in-law, Esther, as she lay a few hours before her death. Her … Read more
Shanghai today is almost unrecognizable from what it looked like in the 1940s, when the young Jesuit priest Dominic Tang Yee-Ming (1908-1995) bicycled with his friend Rev. Ignatius Kung Pin-Mei from parish to parish to hear confessions. He taught English in the Jesuit high school in Shanghai where Kung was the principal and Latin teacher. … Read more
On January 9, Ray Ruddy, president of Boston’s Gerard Health Foundation, wrote a letter to Georgetown University President John J. DeGioia asking him to disavow or retract a Georgetown report entitled “Faith Communities Engage the HIV/AIDS Crisis.” The report, published in November by Georgetown’s Berkley Center for Religion, Peace, & World Affairs, criticizes faith-based approaches … Read more
A friend recently put it to me that the Church has a Galileo Complex. Terrified by the historical narrative of the Church’s resistance to and persecution of science, Christians are averse to challenging “scientific” claims. God’s Undertaker: Has Science Buried God? By John Lennox Lion Hudson, 192 pages, $14.99  A friend recently put it … Read more
In early August 2006, the Global War on Terror reached a new and disturbing phase, when it was discovered that Terror has now recruited certain liquids as deadly new allies in its bloodthirsty campaign to wipe out our freedom. As this dramatically heightened threat shows, Terror knows no bounds in its resourceful ability to find … Read more
I don’t mind football, as long as it’s other mothers’ sons who are crashing their bodies around the field. When it comes to my own sons’ participation, however, I prefer gentler sports. Like chess. Thankfully, my oldest boys have thus far seemed content to play little league baseball, basketball, and various forms of amateur, no-holds-barred … Read more
The Catholic voter problem that surfaced in Iowa has followed Gov. Mike Huckabee to New Hampshire. In Iowa, Huckabee received strong support in predominately Evangelical counties, but his support fell sharply in counties with large numbers of Catholic voters. There was no improvement in New Hampshire for the former governor of Arkansas. Sen. John McCain … Read more
In the middle of my junior year (1970-71) at Loyola University of Los Angeles (now Loyola Marymount University), we had two distinguished guest lecturers: Rev. Hans Kung and Professor Dietrich von Hildebrand. The contrasting manner of their reception at Loyola, as well as their personal effect on me, makes for an interesting story. First, … Read more
A friend of mine tells of attending a showing at a Jesuit university of a video produced to mark the centenary of the birth in 1907 of Rev. Pedro Arrupe, S.J., “the Basque Jesuit,” who as a missionary in Japan tended the wounded and dying after the atom-bombing of Hiroshima, and was superior general of … Read more
On the Feast of the Annunciation in 2003, Military Archbishop Edwin O’Brien wrote: “Long after the [Iraq] hostilities cease, the debate likely will continue as to the moral justification for the armed force recently initiated by the United States and its allies. It is to be hoped that all factors which have led to our … Read more
Everyone has an opinion about Iraq and whether we should let go or hang on. But who is taking the longer view? The presidential election beckons. Where is the right leader to move us forward? Islamic extremists are not just guided by their history — they are entrenched in it. They are still enraged over … Read more
The “Catholic vote” is the key for the reemergence of the Democratic Party as a competitive force in presidential elections. Party chairman Howard Dean summarized the recent problems when he said, “The Democratic Party was built on four pillars — the Roosevelt intellectuals, the Catholic Church, labor unions and African Americans. But we stopped communicating … Read more
A sumptuous travel magazine — to which, I need scarcely add, we do not subscribe — arrived in our letter box the other day. Things are so beautifully laid-out these days that one cannot always tell whether a given item is actually just a piece of advertising. In any case, the cover shows … Read more
To win the White House in 2008, the Democrats have to win back the Catholic voters they lost to the GOP in 2000 and 2004. A previous Window forecast that if the Democrats nominated Hillary Clinton, she would win the Catholic vote. However, with his commanding victory in the Iowa caucus, Barack Obama may be … Read more
See if you can spot anything wrong with the following claim, a version of which seems to appear in a book, magazine, or newspaper every few weeks for as long as I’ve been reading public commentary on economic matters: The dominant idea guiding economic policy in the United States and much of the globe has … Read more
Charlie Brown famously wondered how Christmas had gotten so commercial. Clearly, Charlie Brown was not an Italian-American; if he were, he might have wondered how Christmas had gotten so gluttonous. Â This Christmas season, as per longstanding tradition, we packed up our five kids and headed down to Long Island, joining my parents, my brother … Read more
From French ninja-antiquers to the Great Venezuelan Toilet Paper Caper, here’s a quick jaunt through the most ridiculous news items of the past month. Overwhelmed with information, we often miss revealing tidbits in the news that can be so enriching to our appreciation of life as it is lived early in the 21st century. Herewith, … Read more
C. S. Lewis once remarked that he was a converted pagan living among apostate Puritans. Our culture is, if anything, even more redolent of curdled apostate Calvinism than it was in Lewis’s day, and that fact can be seen everywhere. On a whimsical note, it is discovered in an NPR broadcast I heard a few … Read more
“The Church is alive!” Â Pope Benedict XVI spoke these stirring words five times over in his homily at the Mass inaugurating his ministry as Bishop of Rome on April 24, 2005. During a recent visit to the Pacific islands of Oceania, as chaplain on a cruise ship, I experienced firsthand what the pope was … Read more
Gov. Mike Huckabee will be a major player in the run for the GOP presidential nomination regardless of whether he finishes first or second in the Iowa Caucus. As in Iowa, Evangelical voters will undergird his efforts in Michigan (Jan 18), South Carolina (Jan 26), and Florida (Jan 29). Huckabee, however, will need Catholic voters … Read more