Tom Roberts

Leo stepped into the fray almost immediately, highlighting that most difficult tangle for Catholics — our relationship with Judaism and the church's response to the Israeli military campaign in Gaza.

Odds-makers likely had an easier time 20 years ago, when Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger stepped onto the balcony overlooking St. Peter's Square as new Pope Benedict XVI.  It was the first conclave NCR would cover in the digital age.

The decadeslong effort to make unrestricted capitalism compatible with Catholic teaching keeps running into obstacles in Vatican II documents, papal encyclicals, bishops' pastoral letters, and Christian Scriptures.

Listen: Being a woman in the Catholic Church, a nun who insists on asking difficult questions and holding those in power to account for what they say and do, can make for a sometimes lonely, difficult life. So why does Sister Joan stay?

Listen: In this episode Sr. Joan Chittister describes how she came to understand the significance of other traditions. Her understanding of the world's wisdom carries practical implications for each of us.
 

Listen: Sr. Joan Chittister still feels the negative effects of being a woman in the Catholic Church, but she also thinks on many levels and in society, things have changed for the better.
 

Childhood memories became a significant force behind Sr. Joan Chittister's relentless advocacy for women in all circumstances, in the church, in society, across cultures.
 

Listen: Sister Joan recounts an incident of struggle in her early life and the lifelong insights that emerged from it.

Listen: Sr. Joan Chittister takes us from her experience of God as a youngster alone in a church to her rejection of the all-male stereotype of a God imagined by men, to a God that cannot fit into convenient descriptions.

Listen: Sr. Joan Chittister talks with Sr. Valerie Luckey, a 36-year-old who entered the Erie Benedictines in 2016. The two provide a look at where tradition sparks and a new, engaging future emerges.

Listen: The much smaller and aging corps of women religious may suggest that this way of religious life is over. "Wrong," says Sr. Joan Chittister, in episode 3 of her podcast, "Risking the Questions."
 

Listen: Benedictine Sr. Joan Chittister has a reputation as one who dares to ask big, bold questions. Explore them with her in this podcast conversation with her friend and biographer, former NCR editor Tom Roberts.

Maybe Busch is as exhausted as the rest of us with the tensions and divisions in the U.S. church. But whatever the cost of the fancy dinners, it is a pittance compared to the money he has invested in divisive politics.

Righting the American Dream: How the Media Mainstreamed Reagan's Evangelical Vision by Diane Winston is a measured and meticulously detailed account of the Reagan era and its significance for today.

For Jewish Israeli academic Neve Gordon, "winning" is an impossible end to the invasion of Gaza, and the Israel-Hamas war is but the latest and grimmest evidence of a doomed strategy.

"Provocative pop-ups like Catholics for Catholics are ecclesiastical equivalents of a financial scam," writes Tom Roberts. "Don't give away the password to your spiritual account." 

The inauguration of anti-corruption reformer Bernardo Arévalo as president of Guatemala comes after decades of struggle to elevate the country's marginalized, especially women and the Indigenous population. 

Archbishop Alexander Sample has barred Mass from a Catholic-Lutheran ecumenical venture that has been underway and allowed for nearly 40 years. Amid Catholic questions about authority, Sample's ban is distressingly archaic.

For Christians, the search for our moral bearings amid the horrific violence of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict may lie not so much in a conclusive statement of right and wrong. It may, instead, lie in encounter.

I am no longer surprised at Gramick's resilience, her faith, her persistence, her endurance, her generosity, her capacity to absorb institutional assaults and remain hopeful. A prophetic talk in 1999 exemplified that.