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Many people have written about Chicago and Chicago childhoods. For example, my college classmate Stuart Dybek churns out short stories in which forlorn children scrape out their ethnic existences against [...]

Scars of War, Wounds of Peace The Israeli-Arab Tragedy Shlomo Ben-Ami Oxford University Press, $30, 354 pp. 'The Israel Lobby' John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt London Review of Books, March [...]

I have met Pope Benedict XVI only once. It was seventeen years ago, when I was a graduate student at Yale. Richard John Neuhaus had organized an invitation-only conference in [...]

Eamon Duffy, professor of the history of Christianity at the University of Cambridge, is one of those rare scholars who are both commanding presences in their fields and frequent contributors [...]

FOREWORD The American Catholics in the Public Square Project began in the spring of 1999 with a preliminary inquiry to some twenty-five experts. The project was approved and awarded a [...]

Inside the Vatican (Harvard University Press) by Thomas J. Reese, S.J., was published December 1. Reese, a political scientist and a fellow at the Woodstock Center, Georgetown University, has previously [...]

My title, 'Dissent and Communion,' joins two terms that often crop up in churchspeak but don't usually live together, much less marry. As will appear, I think that's regrettable (the [...]

The Catholic church in the United States is a large, diverse, and contradictory body. It is 55 million people from virtually every country, ethnic, and racial grouping in the world. [...]

The Much Too Promised Land America's Elusive Search for Arab-Israeli Peace Aaron David Miller Bantam, $16, 416 pp. Innocent Abroad An Intimate Account of American Peace Diplomacy in the Middle [...]

To the Castle and Back Vaclav Havel Translated by Paul Wilson Alfred A. Knopf, $27.95, 400 pp. It is always a pleasure to read Vaclav Havel. His new book displays [...]

Squandered Victory The American Occupation and the Bungled Effort to Bring Democracy to Iraq Larry Diamond Times Books, $25, 384 pp. When a final accounting of the U.S. war in [...]

Mark Danner called it 'the frozen scandal.' He was talking about torture. 'We're doing it; we know about it; we do not have legal or moral ways to confront it,' [...]

The Missing Peace The Inside Story of the Fight for Middle East Peace Dennis Ross Farrar, Straus and Giroux, $35,840 pp. Waging Peace Israel and the Arabs, 1948-2003 Itamar Rabinovich [...]

When a born-again Methodist from Texas is touted as the Catholic candidate while the Catholic candidate from Massachusetts is treated as an apostate, you know that the Catholic community has [...]

Madam Secretary A Memoir Madeleine Albright Miramax, $27.95, 562 pp. Madeleine Albright's measure as secretary of state (1997-2001) could be taken by comparing her to Warren Christopher, her predecessor, and [...]

Dolores Leckey worked at the National Conference of Catholic Bishops for twenty years. At her retirement in December 1997, she headed the secretariat that staffed committees on the laity, on [...]

Will the Catholic church in the United States enter the new millennium as a church of promise, augmented by the faith of rising generations and able to be a leavening [...]

The key word is argument, actually make that plural; here are four arguments about homosexuality that Andrew Sullivan engages with intelligence and vigor. Editor of the New Republic and an [...]

Child of My Heart Alice McDermott Farrar, Straus and Giroux, $23, 242 pp. The narrator of Child of My Heart sums up the story: 'Petey, who always used to ask, [...]

We have had good reason this year, which has produced the greatest crisis in the history of the U.S. Catholic Church, to remember a man who faced the clerical sexual-abuse [...]

I joined Commonweal in 1988, and its two-week schedule has set the rhythm of my thinking, reading, writing, and social life ever since. Twenty-two times a year for fifteen years [...]

In a dismal season for the Catholic Church, one bright if poignant note has been sounded by celebrations around the country marking the opening of Vatican II on October 11, [...]

Under discussion: Firehouse David Halberstam Hyperion, $22.95, 201 pp. Report from Ground Zero Dennis Smith Viking, $24.95, 359 pp. '102 Minutes' Jim Dwyer, Eric Lipton, Kevin Flynn, James Glanz, and [...]

Surveying the battlefield of the sex-abuse scandal, I have come to the conclusion that the Catholic Church in the United States will never be the same. I said that to [...]

In Thursday, May 23, Richard Ostling of the Associated Press called to ask what I made of the 'Weakland story.' What Weakland story? Ostling then e-mailed the first accounts. On [...]

A Problem from Hell America and the Age of Genocide Samantha Power Basic Books, $30, 610 pp. Genocide is the problem from hell. Right behind it is the problem of [...]

One-third of Americans alive today were born after 1975 when the United States was finally driven from its futile war in Vietnam. That explains an airplane conversation I had going [...]

By the time Ambassador Robert White was posted to El Salvador in 1980, he knew full well that politics could be a deadly affair. At age seventeen, he had joined [...]

In a recent article in the Nation ('Freedom from Religion,' February 19), Ellen Willis, director of the cultural journalism program at NYU, makes a candid, straightforward, and wrong-headed argument about [...]

Abigail Quigley McCarthy died on February 1 at her home in Washington, D.C. She was eighty-five. Mrs. McCarthy wrote a column in these pages from 1974 to 1999. She had [...]

The Virgin festooned with pornographic photos and elephant dung has come and gone. But her apparition in the Brooklyn Museum of Art left behind disquieting information, not about religion and [...]