America Magazine - Current Issue

Of Many Things

Dorothy Day reported in December 1932 that peace disappeared quickly when marchers arrived in Wilmington, Del. Church windows shattered and tear gas intruded on the mass meeting. When people scattered outside, the police beat them. Closer to Washington, D.C., participants in the Communist-organized Hunger March—though nonviolent—were held on a stretch of roadway as prisoners.

Dorothy wrote in her autobiography, The Long Loneliness, “I stood on the curb and w

Current Comment

Young Americans

What now seems like eons ago, the presidential race began with arguably the most diverse cast of candidates in our nation’s history. As we enter the fall stretch, the field includes an African-American and a woman, a heartening display of the diversity that is now acknowledged as a fact of life by most Americans. The ascendancy of both Barack Obama and Sarah Palin was unexpected, and in many ways they are unlikely representatives of their respective demographic groups. Unlike most African-American leaders of the last 40 years, Obama did not take

Signs of the Times

Houma-Thibodaux Diocese Severely Hit by Storm

Archbishop Alfred C. Hughes of New Orleans reported on Sept. 2 that of Louisiana’s seven Catholic dioceses, the Diocese of Houma-Thibodaux was battered the hardest by Hurricane Gustav. Hughes, who rode out the storm at the St. Louis Cathedral rectory after helping hundreds of residents evacuate the city on buses, said he spoke briefly late on Sept. 1 with Bishop Sam G. Jacobs of Houma-Thibodaux. “I suspect the Houma-Thibodaux Diocese suffered the greatest damage” among Louisiana’s dioceses, Archbishop Hughes said

A Space for Inquiry

Religion is flourishing in the United States in the number of adherents, but so are religious ignorance and religious intolerance. Both can be linked to the systematic exclusion from public discourse and intellectual life of a healthy examination of the religious impulse. With its deep foundation in humanism and its legacy from St. Ignatius Loyola on the discernment of spirits, Jesuit education offers a vital forum for the study of theology, which is not the catechesis of the young, but the intellectual exploration of the human need to probe the meaning of life. “Education is integral to the mission of the church to proclaim the good news,” Pope Benedict XVI insisted in his Ap

An Unusual Partnership

Why are Jesuit universities in the United States hiring Muslims to teach Islamic studies? And why would a Muslim professor leave a well-paying post at a state university to teach at a Jesuit institution? These are just two of the questions raised earlier this year at a meeting of Muslim professors of Islam at Jesuit universities, which was held in Washington, D.C. The meeting was organized by the national coordinator for interreligious dialogue of the U.S. Jesuit Conference, and Jesuit and Muslim scholars from nine Jesuit institutions took part.

Marcia K. Hermansen, a professor of theology and director of the Islamic world program at Loyola Uni

Christians Who Can Breathe and Laugh

The 400th anniversary of the birth of Jean-Jacques Olier on Sept. 20 is likely to pass unnoticed in the United States, given the relatively low visibility of his foundation, the Sul-picians. Diocesan priests released by their bishops for the work of seminary education, the Sul-picians are named for Olier’s parish of St. Sulpice in Paris (recently made famous, or infamous, by Dan Brown’s The Da Vinci Code). In Quebec and elsewhere in Canada, they still enjoy something of the kind of prominence th

Learning Alone

Catholic colleges and universities are by most accounts admirably consistent in their emphasis on community and cooperation as a way of life and learning. With their emphases inside and outside the classroom on social justice, service and solidarity, and with the myriad opportunities they offer students to “get involved,” such institutions help to counter the destructive individualism that seems ingrained in American society. Yet I wonder if it is not time for a counterintuitive moment that stresses not the group or the cohort, but the individual student instead. From my vantage point as a teacher and part-time administrator engaged in ongoing conversations about student learn

Steps Toward Justice

As Superior General of the Jesuits, Pedro Arrupe said he hoped graduates of Jesuit schools would become “men [and women] for others.” But most students and graduates of Jesuit schools have never heard the full context in which he used this phrase.

Here is what Father Arrupe said in his speech to the International Congress of Jesuit Alumni of Europe in Valencia, Spain, on July 31, 1973:

Today our prime educational objective must be to form men [and women] for others; men [and women] who will live not for themselves but for God and his Christ—for the God-man who lived and died for all the world; men [and women] who cannot even conceive of love of G

Teaching Evolution

There is no issue more visible and emotional in the field of science education today than evolution, and no state where the issue has been more hotly debated than Florida. For much of the last year, a committee of educators and scientists worked with officials from the state’s Department of Education to hammer out new standards for science education. Their decision to designate evolution one of the “big ideas” in the state’s science curriculum was opposed by groups like the Florida Family Policy Council and conservative lawmakers who objected to the teaching of evolution in the classroom. In the end a compromise was reached, a

The Faith of a Child

Few catechists in this country could have predicted the popularity of a religious education movement called the Catechesis of the Good Shepherd. “In 1985, I sent a personal Christmas card to everyone in the United States who was involved in C.G.S.,” Tina Lillig, director of the National Association of the Catechesis of the Good Shepherd, told me. “I think I needed 23 stamps. Last month we sent out our annual mailing to 1,400 association members, and we estimate that there are an additional 900 or so people who are actively working in C.G.S.” As national director for 13 years, Lillig has seen interest steadily grow and spread, bu

Back to the Future

The Bush administration will remain in office until the inauguration of a new president on Jan. 20, 2009, but the Pentagon brought the moving vans in early, shipping out much of the Bush administration’s foreign policy slogans from the recently issued National Defense Strategy. Gone is the term “global war on terrorism.” The military was never in favor of that label, nor with focusing on the military as the primary tool to combat terrorism. Gone is the emphasis on hard power and unilateralism.

Instead, the document repeatedly says that working with partners, engaging in the com

Away From the Pulpit, Into the Pews

I have just reviewed the evaluations for my American Catholic history course and, once again, many students cited our “field trip” across Notre Dame’s campus to the Basilica of the Sacred Heart as the highlight of the semester. They had listened with rapt attention as Peter Rocca, C.S.C., the rector of the basilica, narrated the stories embedded in the stained-glass windows, explained the provenance of the treasures that adorn the sacristy and side altars, and described the various architectural changes that have transformed the church since its construction more than a century ago.

But our basilica tour is more than a merry outing for my students. The building a

Seeing With New Eyes

Like many of my contemporaries, I eagerly read The Divine Milieu in the early 1960s, as soon as it was translated into English. I recall being inspired by Pierre Teilhard de Chardin’s bold and sweeping vision. It was the first time I had ever been exposed to such a radical and optimistic Christian worldview. I have to confess that I did not fully comprehend this worldview. Teilhard’s vision did not mesh with current theological categories. I put his insights aside and focused on literature fostered by the theological and spiritual renewal occasioned by the Second Vatican Council.

But I am grateful to Martin Marty’s new book appears in a series called “Modern Library Chronicles,” which includes similarly concise volumes on such complex subjects as the Renaissance, Shakespeare and the Catholic Church, by authors as redoubtable as Paul Johnson, Frank Kermode and Hans Küng. Treating a topic as large as global Christianity within a single slender volume requires an extraordinary grasp of the subject, an efficient style and a gift for organization. Marty here demonstrates once more that he remains in firm possession

She

After my late aunt got her third new hip,
The third in an eventual parade of seven,
I call to razz her about having more hips
Now than she had been originally issued,
& she laughed but then characteristically
Sailed off in a disquisition about prayer
And how it did and didn’t work hipwise,
And how the doctors had used the bones
Of a deceased woman in her hip surgery,
And how she conversed with the Mother
About this among various other subjects,
And the Mother, noted my cheerful aunt,
Was a woman of endless gentle patience,
For I pepper the poor soul with moaning
And complaints all the blessed day long,
Sa

Both Just and Merciful

The two great attributes of God in the Bible are justice and mercy. Today’s responsorial psalm reminds us that “the Lord is just in all his ways.” But we also hear that “the Lord is gracious and merciful,” and the reading from Isaiah 55 urges us to “turn to the Lord for mercy; to our God, who is generous in forgiving.” Is there any coherence or consistency between these statements about God? Today’s parable from Matthew 20 about the generous employer and the various persons hired to work in his vineyard concerns the relationship between God’s justice and God’s mercy. The point is that while God is both just and merciful, God&rsqu

Letters

National Treasures

I was delighted to read Bryan Linden-berger’s account of the restoration of Our Lady of Purification church in Doña Ana, N.M., in “A Church Reborn” (8/25). I grew up in nearby Las Cruces, N.M. Our historic churches are truly a national treasure, and many have already been lost forever.

David Paz, O.F.M.

Guaymas, Mexico

Hard Questions

Many thanks to Camille D’Arienzo, R.S.M., for “Mercy Toward Our Fathers” (8/25), regarding priests guilty of the sexual abuse of minors. D’Arienzo aske