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Columnists and contributors
Cardinal-designate Timothy M. Dolan
ObamaCare and religious freedom
Posted: 2/3/2012
Religious freedom is the lifeblood of the American people, the cornerstone of American government. When the Founding Fathers determined that the innate rights of men and women should be enshrined in our Constitution, they so esteemed religious liberty that they made it the first freedom in the Bill of Rights.
Drs. Angela and David Franks
Love never abandons the suffering
Posted: 2/3/2012
A frail old man lies in bed, with a nasal-gastric tube giving him liquid nourishment. He is surrounded by loved ones. He is dying.
Jaymie Stuart Wolfe
Questions and answers
Posted: 2/3/2012
You can interrupt a question at any time to answer it, but you'd better make sure you're answering the right question. If your team gives an incorrect answer, you lose five points. If the opposing team then answers it correctly, they get ten points. So how much does a wrong answer cost you? Fifteen points. If you think you know the answer, don't answer the question. Only answer the question if you know that you know the answer.
George Weigel
Seekers or finders?
Posted: 2/3/2012
On the solemnity of the Epiphany, I heard a sermon -- a rather well-delivered one at that -- about the Magi as religious "seekers." The same note, I'll wager, was struck from pulpits and ambos across the country, perhaps across the world.
Clark Booth
Until the big game … some thoughts
Posted: 2/3/2012
Have some slices of this and that and stray observations to share while waiting for the pen-ultimate meeting of your Patriots and their Giants. As ever, one is reminded of the cherished hope of the late, great Dick Schaap who -- while staring down at the massively excessive panoply of the half-time show at Soupey IX -- memorably uttered, "Someday somehow maybe we can have a nation worthy of the Super Bowl."
E. Christian Brugger
Ruling on health care needs to be judged in light of truth
Posted: 1/27/2012
WASHINGTON, D.C. (Zenit) -- There is a lot of anger over the Obama administration's recently announced decision to require religiously-affiliated employers to cover contraceptive services in their insurance plans, and rightly so. On Friday, the secretary for the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), Kathleen Sebelius, announced that institutions such as Catholic universities and hospitals have one-year to "adapt" their policies to ensure employee coverage for all FDA approved contraceptives, including the abortion drug Ella, no copays, no deductibles.
Father Roger J. Landry
Living and dying with dignity
Posted: 1/27/2012
Last June, the bishops of the United States approved and published a superb statement against Physician-Assisted Suicide entitled, "To Live Each Day with Dignity." It was a response of spiritual shepherds to wolves in white medical jackets who pretend that the compassionate response to those who are contemplating taking their lives is to give them the drugs to do it.
Dwight G. Duncan
Time to figure out how to violate our consciences
Posted: 1/27/2012
Last Friday the Obama administration announced that it would not exempt religious employers and Catholic organizations like colleges, hospitals and charities from a new regulation requiring them to provide insurance coverage for sterilization and contraception, even if they cause abortion. The regulation, which goes into effect Aug. 1, but which federal officials said would be delayed another year until 2013 for church-related organizations, rides roughshod over the conscientious moral and religious beliefs of many Catholics and others. The effective date of the controversial regulation is conveniently after the presidential elections.
Clark Booth
Bruins break before Soupey XLVI
Posted: 1/27/2012
No doubt you like the look and tempo of the hockey season so far. You are still feasting off that fabulous frolic last spring. The game seems healthier than it's been in a long time. Crowds are big. Revenues are up. The TV networks are even back sniffing around in search of some action. And above all, your beloved team is still riding high; as tough a bloke as you'll find on the block.
Adam J. MacLeod
Purpose, palliative care, and respect for human life
Posted: 1/20/2012
Aiding the deliberate destruction of human life has no place in the doctor's job description.
The Massachusetts Medical Society recently voted to affirm its opposition to physician-assisted suicide. This vote matters because a movement is now afoot to de-criminalize assisted suicide in Massachusetts (and elsewhere). If successful, this movement would enlist physicians to assist in acts of self-murder. The physicians want no part in that. The president of the Massachusetts Medical Society, Lynda Young, stated, "Physicians of our Society have clearly declared that physician-assisted suicide is inconsistent with the physician's role as healer and health care provider." Aiding the deliberate destruction of human life has no place in the doctor's job description.
Kevin and Marilyn Ryan
Why homeschool your children
Posted: 1/20/2012
Homeschooling is one of the fastest growing and least understood educational and cultural movements in the country today. Over one-and-a-half million elementary and secondary students, 3 percent of the age group, have exited the public schools to be educated at home. In full disclosure, while both of us are former public school teachers, we need to acknowledge that all of our 10 grandchildren are being (or scheduled to be) homeschooled.
Mary Ann McLaughlin
Why Catholic? A journey through the catechism
Posted: 1/20/2012
Shortly after Cardinal Seán arrived in Boston he asked the staff of the then-Office of Spiritual Development (now, the Office of Worship and Spiritual Life) to meet with him. In that meeting he spoke of RENEW International and his experience of working with them in other dioceses. He had hopes of using the expertise of the RENEW process to help the Church in Boston begin to move from isolation to communion by forming small faith sharing communities. The meeting that day was only the beginning...there would be a number of years of consultation.
Debbie Rambo
New Year, new hope
Posted: 1/20/2012
As we turn the calendar page from 2011 and 2012, we at Catholic Charities look hopefully to the New Year ahead. Despite the enormous challenges faced by many in our communities during this time of seemingly unending recession, examples of strength and resilience, optimism and determination, compassion and generosity abound.
Clark Booth
Cooperstown review
Posted: 1/20/2012
According to recent revelations by the BBC, the prize jury assigned to choose the winner of the 1961 Nobel Prize for Literature had among its nominees Graham Greene, Robert Frost, E.M. Forster, Isak ("Out of Africa") Dinesen and Mr. Hobbit himself, J.R.R Tolkien. Instead, they chose an obscure teller of tall tales from Yugoslavia named Ivo Andric, whose obscurity has only deepened over the half century since past.
Jaymie Stuart Wolfe
No debate
Posted: 1/20/2012
My favorite television show has been on a lot lately. At least that's what everybody in my house has been calling the long succession of Republican presidential debates. I love watching an election year unfold. Maybe it's the gladiatorial-combat-loving part of me.
Father Tadeusz Pacholczyk
The premarital sex "test drive"
Posted: 1/13/2012
During a 2011 roundtable discussion on Fox News, guest commentator Jay Thomas argued that young people should not be too concerned when it comes to pre-marital sex, because nobody would choose to "buy a car without driving it first. You don't get married, and you don't learn about sex, by not having it." Any reasonable person would prefer to avoid someone who might be, in his words, "odd in the sack," much as any reasonable person would prefer to avoid getting a lemon when purchasing a new car. Mr. Thomas, therefore, could hardly envision anyone's committing to marriage without first "kicking the tires" a bit, and going for a sex "test drive."
By Father Robert Barron
A persecuted Church and its heroes
Posted: 1/13/2012
A recent survey has indicated something that should lift the hearts of Christians everywhere, namely, that the fastest growing religion on the planet is Christianity. This explosive growth is on particularly clear display in Africa and Asia, where churches and seminaries can't be built fast enough to accommodate the need. It is especially important that we in the West become cognizant of this state of affairs, for with the rise of secularism and the fall-off in church attendance in Europe, Canada, Australia, and America, we can far too easily assume that Christianity is in a state of permanent decline. Au contraire, in point of fact.
Clark Booth
From the gridiron
Posted: 1/13/2012
When the admirable Houston Antwine quietly departed this mortal coil the other day some strong and sweet memories of the way the game used to be were stirred among those of us privileged to have been around when the American Football League was winning the struggle to gain a toehold in skeptical towns like Boston thanks entirely to guys like "Twine." The tributes were touching.
George Weigel
Converts and the symphony of truth
Posted: 1/13/2012
Why do adults become Catholics?
There are as many reasons for "converting" as there are converts. Evelyn Waugh became a Catholic with, by his own admission, "little emotion but clear conviction": this was the truth; one ought to adhere to it. Cardinal Avery Dulles wrote that his journey into the Catholic Church began when, as an unbelieving Harvard undergraduate detached from his family's staunch Presbyterianism, he noticed a leaf shimmering with raindrops while taking a walk along the Charles River in Cambridge, such beauty could not be accidental, he thought--there must be a Creator. Thomas Merton found Catholicism aesthetically, as well as intellectually, attractive: once the former Columbia free-thinker and dabbler in communism and Hinduism found his way into a Trappist monastery and became a priest, he explained the Mass to his unconverted friend, poet Robert Lax, by analogy to a ballet. Until his death in 2007, Cardinal Jean-Marie Lustiger insisted that his conversion to Catholicism was not a rejection of, but a fulfillment of, the Judaism into which he was born; the cardinal could often be found at Holocaust memorial services reciting the names of the martyrs, including "Gisele Lustiger, ma maman" ("my mother").
Michael Pakaluk
College quandary
Posted: 1/6/2012
All Catholic parents planning to send a child to college next year -- and going through the usual rounds of applications and campus visits -- should consider the following difficulty: (1) higher education for a Catholic is necessarily a philosophical education; yet (2) almost no colleges, even ostensibly "Catholic" institutions, require students to take courses which amount to a sound philosophical education, and there are very few campuses where it is even possible to get a sound philosophical education by taking electives.
Dale O'Leary
Freedom of religion
Posted: 1/6/2012
Freedom of religion is being attacked under the guise of preventing discrimination. To be discriminating used to be a good thing. To discriminate means to recognize a distinction. A discriminating person was one who had or showed good judgment or taste -- a person who was able to distinguish between, and therefore preferred, things of greater intrinsic value over things of lesser or no value. Surely, it is a trait to which we should all aspire.
Clark Booth
2011 -- the year in review
Posted: 1/6/2012
If regrettably and mostly for all the wrong reasons, 2011 was a landmark-year in Sport. While no stats are kept on this subject, it is reasonable to suggest there has never been another that featured more rancor, tumult, controversy, scandal, and downright embarrassment. In balance, it was deplorable.
George Weigel
The weakness of tyranny
Posted: 1/6/2012
Blessed John Paul II loved the Christmas season. Guests in the papal apartment during his pontificate found the seasonal decorations up early in Advent; and, following Polish custom, they stayed up until Feb. 2, the feast of the Presentation of the Lord. The Christmas meal was traditionally Polish. Every year, John Paul would call his lay friends in Cracow, all assembled in one apartment, and they would sing Polish carols together for hours, over the phone.
Jaymie Stuart Wolfe
The space between
Posted: 1/6/2012
Nadja, our first year law student, has always enjoyed artistic pursuits. She won a children's best-of-show prize at the Topsfield Fair with a pencil drawing of a cat, majored in theater costume design along with Russian studies in college, and took paint, brushes, and canvas to Moscow during her two year teaching contract.
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