All hail that most American of snacks, the Girl Scout cookie, with its two vital lessons in capitalism: Pound on enough doors and your troop goes to Space Camp�or, send the sales sheet with Daddy ...

Quilts, like all big projects, eventually become metaphors. It's no surprise; quilts, like life, are enormous undertakings that should only be started after much careful consideration and, possibly, alcohol. Certainly, I knew how much work ...

Catholic high school boys battle adolescent angst while devising pranks against authority figures in the imaginative, entertaining, and heartbreaking film, "The Dangerous Lives of Altar Boys" (ThinkFilm). This adaptation of the late Chris Fuhrman's novel, directed ...

Who can blame those who lost friends and loved ones on 9/11 for thinking God let them down? And who can blame them for thinking that a benevolent and loving deity, if it exists, is ...

Moments of extreme fear. We've felt them. Your life is hanging in the balance. And the outcome is anything but certain. The seconds before your car hits another. Moments before the surgeon administers general anesthesia. Witnessing ...

Could it be that the United States is suffering a severe case of "sympathy envy" these days? Surely no other nation's been too keen on the morality of U.S. war aims since it earned the honor ...

 The other day a priest I know, wearing his roman collar, was walking down the street in Manhattan. A mother and her toddler child were heading in the opposite direction. When she saw my friend, ...

"There are two kinds of people in this world," says Graham, the ex-Episcopalian priest played by Mel Gibson in Signs, the new thriller from Sixth Sense director M. Night Shyamalan. There ...

Will we ever know why the elder and younger Presidents Bush have such a fervent obsession with toppling Iraq? Morally, can the United States government justify making war on the people of Iraq on the grounds ...

Kandahar captures what every U.S. radio, television and print journalist has been trying to make come to life for Americans over the past four months. If you're like me, you're a kind of numb to all ...

It was playwright Bertold Brecht who said that the only crime greater than robbing a bank was founding one. Brecht must have been thinking of powerful and cunning individuals like Enron chairman and CEO Kenneth ...

World Youth Day is this absolutely insane gathering of Catholic young people from all over the world, who converge on some poor unsuspecting city and basically ...

"Love on the rocks, ain't no big surprise. Just pour me a drink and I'll tell you some lies?" -- From Neil Diamond's "Love On the Rocks" While flipping through my bible (Entertainment Weekly) the other day, I ...

BustedHalo: If there were only one question I could ask you, it would be what you meant by "Faith is partly a matter of humbly applied wit." ...

This is my very favorite at-work freakout story. An office worker, fearing anthrax contamination, pulled on a pair of rubber gloves to protect him as he opened a stack of mail. As we worked, he was ...

What would it be like to see the face of God with your own eyes? In the year 1084 St. Bruno of Cologne and six companions climbed a mountain in ...

In the mid 1980s, I was studying theology in Boston. Several other young Jesuits and I moved from Cambridge—where the Jesuit School of Theology was located near Harvard Square—to live ...

BustedHalo: Nancy, your book, An Infinity of Little Hours, is an extraordinary look at life inside a Carthusian monastery, something no one has ever done before. The reason you were able ...

We waited and we hoped and then we went to the midnight show. We were not disappointed. They got this one just right; the film adaptation of Harry Potter ...

"We got some other girls together and we went out to our first strip club." It may sound like the beginnings of a wild bachelorlette party but in fact it ...