It has long been the case that the forces arrayed against the media have been overwhelming, and, with journalistic ranks thinning, there is less and less resistance to spin, disinformation and propaganda. George Orwell’s vision in 1984 is beginning to look like old news. It is not just fake news that is the problem. Increasingly, Read more
A recent post at Atlas Obscura has drawn attention to the fact that C.S. Lewis and his friend J.R.R. Tolkien both saw, and both disliked, Walt Disney’s masterpiece Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs. To anyone familiar with Tolkien and Lewis’s sensibilities, that’s hardly surprising. Indeed, it would be impossible to imagine Tolkien — who Read more
Pope Francis gave a talk at the TED international conference, which brings in influential speakers, in Vancouver on the evening of Tuesday, April 25. The talk – a surprise for all in the audience – recapitulated the key themes of the Argentinian pope’s view of the human person: We are all related and interconnected; scientific Read more
The Promise, the grandest big-screen portrayal ever made about the mass killings of Armenians during World War I, has been rated by more than 111,300 people on IMDb — a remarkable total considering it doesn’t open in theatres until Friday and has thus far been screened only a handful of times publicly. The passionate reaction is Read more
One of the happiest days in my life was the day in 1999 when I became an American citizen. Born in Italy while my Syrian father, then a medical student, was doing his residency there, I had later met and married a Syrian-American U.S. citizen, Rashid Jijakli, the father of my three American-born children. Three Read more
It’s ironic that Bill O’Reilly — perhaps the most prominent Catholic conservative on American television — was fired the same day he met Pope Francis. The two occupy different intellectual parts of the Catholic Church, and the television personality has made his disdain for some of the pope’s positions known. After Francis derided then-candidate Donald Trump’s Read more
The greatest pastoral challenge facing New Zealand today is to keep the distinction between what is essential and what is secondary. We risk substituting God with good things… Faith continually evolves. How we understand aspects of our faith today is different from a year ago or five or ten. We grow in insight (cf. Dei Read more
Terry and I were in a rental car in Jordan. We’d driven from Amman to the site where Moses stood to view the Promised Land. Narrow roads wound through wilderness with occasional habitation: some Bedouin tents, boys with a few sheep or goats walking behind them, a small town with a roadside stall where aromatic Read more
Fifty years ago, Blessed Pope Paul VI gave to the world a truly prophetic encyclical letter Populorum Progressio (“The Development of Peoples), and just days later Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr. delivered his powerful speech, “Beyond Vietnam: A Time to Break Silence.” As kindred spirits in Christ, they both knew the grave dangers facing humanity Read more
Is Holy Week really worth the effort? If you talk to pastors, liturgists, choir directors, leaders of RCIA, etc., Holy Week is a time of frenetic activity, the culmination of much planning and lack of planning, and somehow—at least sometimes—inspiring. And then…? Well, a few weeks of lilies and extra “Alleluias!” and then back to Read more