Reporting

Notes from the alternative nation “. . . . It’s hard to fully understand the late-twentieth-century U.S.A. without taking note of the fact that more and more people are putting their treasure where their heart is. Indeed, the Christian Booksellers Association says that Americans are spending about $3 billion a year on things Christian. . . . ”

A wanderer no longer wonders where he’s bound “. . . . Dion’s own star fell just as quickly as it rose. The rock ‘n’ roll scene in those early years was shifting fast....By 1965, when he recorded a mesmerizing version of ‘Spoonful,’ the great bluesman Willie Dixon’s paean to love or drugs, he was fully in the thrall of heroin addiction. . . . ”

A new frequency of faith “. . . . When the nation’s first commercial Catholic radio network went off the air in May 2000 after just 18 months in operation, the signal seemed loud and clear—‘all–Catholic, all–the–time’ is a format without a future. . . .”

A sermon in the Rocky Mountains “. . . ‘We are a family living like monks,’ says Christine Meert, a small woman in her mid–40s with a big smile and short, tousled hair. . . . And with their radical living arrangements, simple habits and beautifully ethereal liturgies. . .they are changing the way Catholics think about prayer and life in this boomtown of the new global economy. . . . ”

At the dimming of the day “. . . . At a time when the terminally-ill like Agnes are offered ‘suicide machines’ and manuals on how to make their ‘final exit,’ St. Peter’s Hospice is keeping clear another path for the dying to walk. . . .”

At Auschwitz, looking for ‘a lost Atlantis’ “. . . . There are Jewish spirits in Catholic Poland, made from flakes of black ash, sealed in a silent sky with the tears of lost memories. These things Rabbi Byron Sherwin believes. . . . ”

The troubled U.S. visit of Poland’s primate “. . . . Rabbi Weiss told reporters that the Vatican built the convent at Auschwitz as part of its ‘hidden agenda’ to ‘Christianize’ the Jewish Holocaust. His counsel, the noted Harvard lawyer Alan Dershowitz, said Catholics ought to be ashamed to have ‘a bigot’ like Cardinal Glemp among ‘the princes of the Church.’ . . . ”

Rabbi loses round in campaign against cardinal “. . . . But Judge Patterson found plenty that was not routine about the rabbi’s process server during a dramatic, day–long hearing Feb. 11 in his Manhattan courtroom. The judge decided that Rabbi Weiss’ two process servers . . . had made ‘intentionally false’ statements to the court. . . . ”