Commentaries
Finding the gems, if you look beneath the surface
In my favorite photo from college, my friend Cara and I are standing next to each other at a party, making funny faces. We could be any other teen best friends in the world, except for what we're wearing: Cara's in a typical blue Abercrombie & Fitch babydoll sports shirt, while I'm in black eyeliner, black nail polish and a black shirt emblazoned with the word "Anticrombie." We couldn't look more different.
Making room for women at the highest rungs of business
In the early 1970s I began to notice what I then called the feminization of Jesuit higher education. I was dean of arts and sciences at Loyola University in New Orleans and then moved on to the presidency of the University of Scranton in Pennsylvania -- both Jesuit schools. Female enrollment was growing on both campuses and I remember wondering whether previously male-dominant Jesuit colleges were up to the challenge of preparing women for positions of leadership in a changing world.
Demanding dignity and safety despite the cost
What a spring it has been for news. With everything from a terrorist attack in Boston to a new pope in Rome (along with an old pope in Rome), it has been news overload. I must confess, the day they locked up Boston and searched for the second bomber, I was riveted to the news channels. But soon, it's off to the next "breaking news."
Tragedy in Bangladesh underscores ethics of global economy
All the world's workers, regardless of where they live, are entitled to safe work environments, human rights and fair wages. All corporations have a moral duty to guarantee this workers' trinity of rights to everyone they pay, directly or indirectly. It is unconscionable when Western companies dodge these obligations by blindly moving operations to places where oversight is lax, governments are blind and executives are corrupt.
Village Square, a new Catholic contemporary concert series, welcomes Scythian
A party in a parish gym might not sound like the most thrilling thing in the world. I thought the same thing until early March when I went to a charity concert for the Little Sisters of the Poor at St. Mary Magdalene school gym in Media. The nationally touring band Scythian made the event a sell-out. The gym was transformed, as young people and old nuns alike, danced, sang and clapped. My friends and I agreed that it was one of the best times we ever had -- perhaps because it was so unexpected.
Sequestration’s unintended consequence: consideration of the poor
Perhaps the reaction sparked by sequester will cause us to examine our lifestyles and ask: How does this decision contribute to the situation of my brothers and sisters? A concrete example affecting enough people may help us to reflect and study how our faith is to influence and impact the economy, not the other way around.
A call for statesmen to step forward, dispel polarization
To be a statesman is to be prophetic and to choose God's ways over mankind's, to desire unity and truth in the face of opposition, and to feel sympathy rather than wrath -- qualities needed to dispel today's growing polarization in our nation.
Impatience, greed and other lessons we should have learned as children
The missing step between wanting something and not wanting to wait for it and taking action to get it without waiting is justification. We create excuses to make our sins acceptable.
The pope’s example about living in solidarity with the poor
One reason the world has reacted with such joy to the election of Cardinal Jorge Mario Bergoglio as Pope Francis is his commitment to the poor. As we have read in many news reports, this is not a purely academic concern on his part. Pope Francis has put his concern into action. For him, it's meant a lifetime of living among the poor and interacting with them. It's meant riding the bus and forsaking the opulent home some feel is a cardinal's due. His devotion has led him into real relationships with people not as privileged as those who sometimes surround a "prince" of the church.
A prophet at the end of the week of fear and evil
That funny little man with the bad haircut peering through binoculars from a bunker into the distance, a staple on every evening television news the week before, was suddenly gone. Kim Jong Un, the dictator of North Korea, had been a constant in the news for promising a nuclear attack. There is no reason to fear, authorities said, North Korea does not have a delivery system capable of reaching the United States. (This recalls the observation made by comedian Mort Sahl concerning the then-feared China: "They have an atomic bomb, but we're told not to worry, they have no delivery system. But with 650 million people, they can line up and pass it hand by hand.")