On November 28, 2010, the National Catholic Reporter, the banner journal of liberal Catholicism, published a lengthy excerpt from a forthcoming book, The Social Mission of the U.S. Catholic Church, by Father Charles Curran. As the NCR editorial on that date put it, Curran “will forever drag a footnote along with him”, no matter what […]

The global financial crisis could be heading to a blue state near you: that is the latest grim news from the New York Times:  “Mounting Debts by States Stoke Fears of Crisis.”  Normally a cheerleader for the free spending (in bluespeak, compassionate) policies of the public sector union dominated, high tax, high cost states like […]

On November 13 of this year, a group of shoppers in the food court of the Seaway mall in Welland, Ontario got the shock of their lives — in a nice way.As you can see in this video, a choir disguised as average shoppers burst into the Hallelujah Chorus, giving a stirring performance that has […]

A few days before Thanksgiving The New York Times carried a brief report about a pre-holiday interfaith breakfast in Westchester County, the affluent suburban area just north of New York City. It was convened by Rabbi Mark Sameth, known as “the country-and-western rabbi”, and the Reverend Steven Phillips, a Methodist described as “a sort of […]

What a difference a year makes.  Last year at this time, the Great Green Delusion — that the United Nations process could deliver a treaty that would stop global warming dead in its tracks — was the hottest idea in town.  Those who dissented were scorned and despised; the environmental movement and its army of […]

As World War Two broke out in Poland, WH Auden wrote about the despair of watching “the clever hopes expire/of a low, dishonest decade.” We are not yet at that pass, but Auden’s poem bears re-reading by anybody trying to read the signs of our increasingly dark and troubled times.There are times when the ideas […]

On November 13, 2010, there were two stories about religion, separated by four pages, in The New York Times. The first, filed by Laurie Goodstein (who reports regularly on religion), dealt with a conference of Roman Catholic bishops on procedures of exorcism. The other story, by Mark Oppenheimer (another regular Times reporter), told of an […]

Yesterday’s North Korean attack on South Korea has evidently frightened many people. That’s natural, for there is some incalculable but not trivial prospect that the fighting could escalate into a huge bloody mess. The attack, and the South Korean response, seems to have led to an emergency National Security Council meeting from which the President […]

As regular visitors to this space will have noticed, I have been unusually slow to post during the last week.  This is not because I’m running out of steam as a blogger.  And it’s not because this is a slow news week.  In recent days the European financial crisis took a dark turn for the […]

In the current issue of The Christian Century there are three items about Lutherans. One is about the economic difficulties incurred by congregations of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America (ELCA) who have left that denomination to protest its decision in August 2009 to allow non-celibate gay clergy and to bless same-sex unions. Thus far […]