As the firestorm of reaction cools to some sentences in Pope Benedict’s talk on September 12 at Regensberg University in Germany, the questions of the hour are: What lessons can be learned, and what impact will it have on Catholic-Muslim relations at-large?
The speech was in large measure a scholarly address criticizing the West for squeezing faith out the door in its love affair with reason, science, and technology. The section relating to Islam represented only three paragraphs, and came at the outset.

Pope Benedict began by recounting a conversation that took place between a 14th century Byzantine Christian emperor and a Persian scholar. “Show me,” he quoted the emperor Manuel II Paleologus…

When I was growing up my mother constantly reminded me that “the path to God is not easy” but as the child of an atheist father and—to my mind—an overly devout mother it was advice I ignored because I had no interest in finding a path to God.
My pragmatic father negated any possibility of a Godly existence within our world, and managed to shrink Jesus down to nothing more than a historically accurate character (he had been a history professor in Poland before we moved to Canada). My mother on the other hand, tried to save me from my father’s uninspiring certainty of realism by bombarding me with parables and tales of realms of divine existence. I chose to believe neither of them.
Total…

Though much has changed in recent years to allow openly Christian musicians to move out of the Christian rock ghetto, it is still rare to come across a self-respecting music fan who would take the genre seriously, let alone admit to actually liking some of it. But in the pages of his entertaining and enlightening study of the Christian music industry entitled Body Piercing Saved My Life, Andrew Beaujon—contributing writer for Spin who also writes for the Washington Post and Salon—reveals this much maligned corner of the music industry to be far less monolithic (and less uniformly lame) than many outsiders realize.
Tracing the growth of the Christian music industry through the recovering hippies…

My last Pure Sex, Pure Love column bemoaned the craziness of the Bridal Registry. Instead of wasting hours, days, even months, learning about thread count and why you need a hostess set of silver, I argued that there are more important discussions brides and grooms should have as they look forward to making a life together.
While this isn’t an earth-shattering argument, you’d be amazed by how many couples would prefer to debate over throw pillows rather than talk about the big-and potentially contentious issues: How many children would you like to have? How will faith be integrated into your family life? What are each spouse’s future goals and dreams? And, of course, finances.
Hot Button #2…

For the last eight months, I’ve had a new boss running my life. Because we don’t know the gender, my husband and I refer to this boss as Bud. Aside from a few ultrasound photos, I’ve never actually seen Bud; that won’t happen for another month or so. In fact, other than the kicks and rumbles in my uterus, I know almost nothing about him or her, which is ironic considering that this little five-pounder is destined to go down in history as the most demanding boss I’ve ever had.
Before Bud, I always knew that pregnancy would be an intensely physical experience, but I had no idea how physical. I didn’t know that I’d be chronically congested, or that I’d have acid reflux so…

The dignity of life must come before profit, is the official position of The Catholic Church on all matters related to medical care. The Catholic community plays a role in all medical and pharmaceutical-related issues both globally and locally.
Global Position
Internationally, in 2001 the Holy See presented its position paper on drug costs to The World Trade Organization, Council for Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights, the official body that oversaw the patent-infringement objections against the production of generic drugs.
In response to the devastation of AIDS, malaria and TB, The Vatican called for the development of methods that would allow the pharmaceutical industry to distribute…

In June 2004 Rutba House, an alternative Christian community in Durham, North Carolina, developed this list of ideals meant to shape the nascent “new monastic” movement, which includes The Simple Way and dozens of other groups.
A New Monasticism
Moved by God’s Spirit in this time called America to assemble at St. Johns Baptist Church in Durham, NC, we wish to acknowledge a movement of radical rebirth, grounded in God’s love and drawing on the rich tradition of Christian practices that have long formed disciples in the simple Way of Christ. This contemporary school for conversion which we have called a “new monasticism,” is producing a grassroots ecumenism and a prophetic…

They started out as good Christians. They thumbed through their Bibles, were concerned with sex and feared God. Then they started taking Christianity seriously.
“This thing Jesus called the Kingdom of God is emerging across the globe in the most unexpected places, a gentle whisper amid the chaos,” writes The Simple Way co-founder Shane Claiborne in The Irresistible Revolution, his manifesto on the movement. “The truth is that much stands in the way of God’s will for our world, beasts like what Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. called the giant triplets of evil: racism, militarism and materialism.”
But in a broken down, post-industrial neighborhood in Philadelphia, a group of young…

Most of us hear about various Islamist groups such as Al-Qaeda, Taliban, Muslim Brotherhood, Hezbollah, and Hamas without understanding what they really represent, why they have won support, and the similarities and differences between them. Similarly we hear the words Sunni and Shia to distinguish Muslims and Islamist groups from one another, but few know what they mean. The following gives a brief overview of Sunni and Shia Muslims, Islamism, and the two Islamists groups most in the news today: Hezbollah and Hamas.
Shia and Sunni Muslims
When the Prophet Muhammad died in the early 7th Century, he left the religion of Islam along with an Islamic State on the Arabian Peninsula with around one hundred thousand…

Steve Cook flinched as a heckler hollered, “You’re a traitor to the gay community.” One of the signs Cook held read, “Pro-Life Alliance of Gays and Lesbians,” and the other “Killing children never advances gay rights.” Soon others joined the chant of “Traitor! Traitor! Traitor!”
Cook was participating in the second-annual Walk for Life West Coast in San Francisco last winter, the West Coast version of the March for Life held annually in Washington, D.C.
Cook said it was obvious that hecklers were singling him out more than the other marchers. One pro-choice protestor even yelled, “Oh, no! There’s a gay man among them.”
Cook,…

Syd Barrett, co-founder of the legendary rock band Pink Floyd, recently passed away at the age of 60. Barrett was a troubled soul, an amalgamation of genius and lunacy who, in the 60′s, ingested LSD like Pez candy and wrote narcotic-inspired songs that influenced thousands of musicians. Barrett’s tenure in Pink Floyd was short—he lasted only one album after which his band mates dismissed him for his crazy, erratic behavior, and replaced him with guitarist and vocalist David Gilmour. Syd spent the past 3 decades living in anonymity in England, avoiding the press and staying far away from the music business.
Despite, or perhaps due to his quasi-monastic seclusion, many rock bands continued…

If the general rule in polite company is always to refrain from discussing politics and religion, Chicago Sun Times writer Cathleen Falsani has spent a good deal of her career blatantly violating at least half of that maxim. The company she keeps doesn’t seem to mind though. The 35-year-old has interviewed dozens of celebrities—from rock stars and authors to athletes and politicians—about their spiritual beliefs and come away with some very surprising answers.
“Inside the spiritual lives of public people” trumpets the subheading to her book The God Factor. Indeed the “God Girl,” as she’s been dubbed, convinced an eclectic group of public figures to…

Thomas Ward agonized over a choice: should he cheat death by ditching his research or forge ahead and prepare to die? He decided to prepare to die.
From 1993 to 2000, Ward, a professor of anthropology at USC, spent nearly every day hanging out on street corners, back alleyways and apartment complexes with members of the legendary street gang Mara Salvatrucha, or MS-13, dubbed by Newsweek as “the fastest-growing, most violent… of the nation’s street gangs.”
Ward said he wanted to study every aspect of the Salvadoran gang: the good and the bad. And about a year into his research, he got a taste of how truly bad things could get. “The first threat occurred when I was at a party and the…

In the world of popular music there is perhaps no genre that is more suspicious of Christian faith than indie rock. Having grown out the late 70s punk movement that rejected most traditional ideologies in favor of unfettered personal expression, the independent music scene remains (at least philosophically) defined by its skepticism for mainstream culture and its outsider status in the world of corporate music conglomerates.
Quite possibly the first self-identified Christian to make significant inroads to the usually hostile scene, Sufjan Stevens has earned listeners through his meticulously crafted compositions and pointedly descriptive narratives. The ornately arranged, quasi orchestral folk-pop…

Moving from California to Guam in third grade, Rebecca Nations anticipated a new school and learning environment as she made the transition from the West Coast to the tropics. But in Guam the rows of lockers, playing fields, chalkboards, desks and cafeteria lines that she was used to in California were now replaced with the living room couch, her family’s backyard and a clear path to the refrigerator. Nations’ parents had made the switch from traditional schooling to home schooling.
Home schooling has been a phenomenon in the United States since the 1970s. Once illegal in 30 states, the practice has been permitted throughout the country since 1993. Because of various state regulations regarding…

David Allen’s parents wanted him to see a psychiatrist. Why? Not because he was depressed, taking drugs or getting bad grades in college but because he wanted to convert to Christianity.
Allen is one of several Jewish-Christians at the University of Southern California who belong to Chaim, a new Christian organization on USC’s campus that claims to provide an environment where Jewish students can learn more about Jesus, and Christian students more about Judaism.
Raised a reformed Jew, Allen (who requested that his real name not be used) made fun of Jesus and Christians when he was growing up, but while dating a Christian girl, he met a friend of her family who introduced him to Christianity.
That’s…

My grandmother loved Jesus. My grandmother’s dog apparently loved Jesus. My grandmother’s car even preached about Jesus. Those are not all good things. She would drive around in her huge, red Oldsmobile with a bumper sticker that read “Lion of the Tribe of Judah.” For those of you who don’t know what that is (Heck, I’m a Christian and I had no idea what it meant), it’s one of Jesus’ little monikers, like Prince of Peace or Lamb of God. I was never quite sure what my grandmother was hoping to achieve by displaying something that ninety percent of regular Bible-reading Christians can’t decipher?
“In the interest of minimizing the number of bumper…

CNS Photo
Last week a friend invited me to attend the world premiere of the film Saint of 9/11, a documentary that tells the story of Father Mychal Judge, Franciscan Friar, who served as chaplain to New York City Fire Department and died in service on September 11, 2001. On his death certificate, Father Judge was listed as “0001″—the first victim of 9/11.
While I knew some of the bare facts regarding his death and had seen the now-famous photograph of his body being carried, pieta-like, from the wreckage of the Twin Towers, I had no knowledge about his life prior to that terrifying disaster.
The film was a masterpiece, and I recommend it to any Catholic, any Christian, or, for that matter, anyone…

It all started with a desperate prayer from a desperate man:
Lord deliver me from myself
I’m in trouble, I need your help…
Not too long ago, Vance Watt was caught in a downward spiral of drugs, booze, violence and incarceration and he was bracing for a crash. His desperate plea was also his first step in turning toward God and eventually became the song, “Deliver Me,” a stirring call for redemption from the lifestyle he used to promote. Now, the 29-year-old married, father of three is the voice of the growing Christian hip-hop scene in St. Louis.
St. Louis Sound
Watt walked away from it all just as he was making a name as an up-and-comer in local rap and hip-hop circles, which, at the time, was…

The other day, while toting my inquisitive four-year-old daughter to preschool, our chat about contemporary political corruption was interrupted by a familiar smell. Taking a moment at a red light to peer in front of the bumper of my Subaru, I stole a glance of the culprit: freshly squashed skunk.
After casually directing my kid’s eyes to the poor beast’s mangled remains, the following dialogue ensued:
“Pee yew! What’s that smell?”
“It’s the smell a skunk makes when it leaves this earth, sweetie.”
“Why’s it leaving?”
“Well, its time had come.”
“Its time for what?”
“Uh, its time to move on, sweetie pie.…