The first person to escape from the Chelmno death camp, Abraham Roy, would live to teach his granddaughter the importance of resistance. Saifullah Parucha, recently released from Guantánamo Bay, may have that chance to pass on a life lesson. Aimeé Ledwell hastens to an appointment with an Indigenous language instructor. Helen Scales popularizes the potential of anticancer chemical compounds extracted from chemosynthetic mussels from hydrothermal vents on the Mid-Atlantic Ridge. Rescued from malignant normality, Robert J. Lifton, assures us our extraordinary adaptive skills can avoid the twin apocalyptic threats to humanity and that a new dimension of reality awaits our grasp. 58 percent agree with the statement, 'I am afraid we are headed toward nuclear war with Russia, according to a Reuters/IPSOS poll taken October 4, 2022, " This, the day after another direct threat to use nuclear weapons by Putin. The article introducing this poll aims at the rear guard of the professiona...

Part I: Saints, as beacons of the Church. Part II: Cultic notes on Black Saints in Early Modern Global Capitalism Train tracks into the city crossed a bridge. Trash and foam marked the rocks of a stream well below. It was probably full of cats, the bag floating, bumping. A sudsy water from industry runoff By the time I walked the tracks with my father, shanties of aluminum roofs,  with cement blocks and masonry floors in some cases, actually strong enough to have survived an earthquake the year before. America was her name, a paraplegic who beamed and in her way welcomed me with a joke, pointing to a picture on the wall, an artist's conception of Jesus. There for half an hour and walking back to the Godparents program I followed the woman, my guide, Soila. I told my dad, in the country for a rotary water project, about America. Maybe he thought of Jessie Crow a 92 year old Lakota elder wasting away from cancer in her home isolated on the Pine Ridge Reservation who my mother would v...

  James Carroll writes "The future will come at us invisibly, frame by frame" ( The Truth At the Heart of the Lie,  316). Pope Francis's call for the multiyear process The Synod on Synodality asks us to listen, study, integrate an enlivened and dialogical faith. How can we become a Church of the Pilgrim People of God?  This process must accommodate those unheard, the vulnerable, the young, alienated. As opposed to the Newark Archdiocese, whose site offers resources to ensure full access of people with disabilities, the Boston Archdiocesan opened a survey asking for one sentence answer. It remains a  live survey --and while imagining how the Archdiocese may listen better you may do your best to mimic Proust in Swann's Way to extend your sentences. eg. listening to the people of parishes and institutions within the Archdiocese Might the good people, hearing the Good News, joining the Walk for Hunger, or this upcoming Winter Walk, rallying for the unhoused or non-...

Written testimony by C.R. Spicer to the Joint Committee on Public Service, House Chair Gordon, Senate Chair Brady, following in-person testimony given June 9 approximately 11:45am. In my remarks, I had followed Nick Cantrell’s analysis of the financial responsibility to divest, pursuant to H. 2597/H.1703 An Act to Divest the State Pension Fund from Nuclear Weapons. I limited my remarks to the moral argument in favor. I expressed thanks to the testimony shared by Dr. Jonathon King and Dr. Ira Hefland, whom you also heard from, colleagues on the Mass Peace Action Working Group for Disarmament, where I have the distinction of leading the Direct Action subcommittee. The personal responsibility for disarmament was taken to Kings Bay Submarine Base, a group of seven performed symbolic and prophetic disarmament, praying the Rosary at the site of sin, pouring blood, then making their case in court that their action followed from the Catholic Social Teaching, as expressed most visibly by Po...

(Speaking of the Mass Peace Action Nuclear Weapons Working Group where we met Sunday, I write to Robert Redwine)  The generosity of this group is truly amazing. I admire deeply this well-spring of connection, and have in the years since attending Boston College in Theology, only a few times attended, despite reading every email, and I almost mean that literally, not every email from MAPA. It's a daily deluge! The question, or rather, your project was new to me. I was surface critiquing the project as if to say how complimentary to my background which has been dispositionally into the humanities and specifically faith-activism akin to the Kings Bay Seven group. To be clear I am strongly biased by "the older, legalist model of moral theology that leaves an impression that Papal condemnation of the possession and threat to use nuclear weapons means 'Stop what you are doing now!'" But as I understand it "his method of accompaniment and discernment is in fact the ...