Poverty-stricken children in Africa have inspired a young Auckland woman to do all she can to give them a greater chance in life. Mary Duncan, 20, has been working hard to help youngsters in Arusha, Tanzania, after spending time with them as a volunteer two years ago. Miss Duncan, who grew up in Howick, decided Read more
Some institutions may not adapt to 21st-century radical transparency. The papacy’s turn to inflammatory rhetoric while hit by a series of damaging leaks suggests that it’s struggling. Strange things have been happening at the Vatican this year. Beginning in January, documents written by high-level figures in the Catholic Church began finding their way into the Read more
A rising tide of restrictions on religion spread across the world between mid-2009 and mid-2010, according to a new study by the Pew Research Center’s Forum on Religion & Public Life. Restrictions on religion rose in each of the five major regions of the world – including in the Americas and sub-Saharan Africa, the two regions Read more
The family is the first and fundamental school of social living: as a community of love, it finds in self-giving the law that guides it and makes it grow. The self-giving that inspires the love of a husband and a wife for each other is the model and the norm for the self-giving that must be practiced in Read more
Harvard researcher Karen King today unveiled an ancient papyrus fragment with the phrase, “Jesus said to them, ‘My wife.’” The text also mentions “Mary,” arguably a reference to Mary Magdalene. The announcement at an academic conference in Rome is sure to send shock waves through the Christian world. The Smithsonian Channel will premiere a special Read more
In central London, a stone’s throw from St. Pancras rail station, is one of the world’s largest libraries, container of national treasures including the Lindisfarne Gospels, begun about the year 700. Recently another Anglo-Saxon Christian treasure, which predates the legendary Lindisfarne Gospels, has been added to the famed British Library’s trove, the St. Cuthbert Gospel Read more
When did computers begin? When you look more closely at the question it dissolves into dust, almost literally, because people calculated with pebbles in the dust millennia ago. When you look at the origins of modern computers people will more likely refer to Alan Turing or John von Neumann or Konrad Zuse. All of these lived in the 20th century. Read more
Believe it or not but a funny thing happened at the 16th Non-Aligned Movement (NAM) summit in Tehran last month. When the new Egyptian president, Mohamed Morsi, denounced the “oppressive” Syrian government, it didn’t go down so well with the pro-Assad Iranians. So, local journalists decided deliberately to mistranslate “Syria”, in Farsi, as “Bahrain”, prompting Read more
A California bill allowing children to have three legal parents will not help children, but instead will unnecessarily complicate their lives. The supposed need for California’s SB 1476 flowed directly from the drive to normalize same sex parenting and recognize same sex unions. Can a child have three parents? If California State Senator Mark Leno Read more
In May of 2005, Archbishop William Levada—who had headed the Archdioceses of Portland (Oregon) and San Francisco—was appointed prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith. In July of 2011, having reached the age of 75, Cardinal Levada duly submitted his resignation from that important curial post. Almost a year later, on July Read more