NCR Connections

Executive editor Tom Roberts aims to help readers understand how recent news stories fit together. NCR Connections will provide guideposts and markers to help lead readers through key issues and stories.

Use of wide-open location data, closed-door meetings hurt Catholics

by Tom Roberts

Jan 15, 2020

NCR Connections: We are troubled by organizations that target voters by collecting mobile phone location data when they go to Sunday Mass and also by conferences like a recent one at Boston College that includes academics and bishops but takes place behind closed doors.

Vulnerability as strength: Keenan's key to dismantling clericalism

by Tom Roberts

Dec 31, 2019

NCR Connections: Jesuit Fr. James Keenan really wants to turn the whole deal on its head. "Hierarchicalism," he writes, "and its lack of accountability and ability to act with impunity will be harder to dismantle than clericalism and in fact will guarantee the survival of clericalism, for the former is the father and promoter of the second." He proposes an alternative "culture of vulnerability as a path to a "servant priesthood" and a "servant episcopacy."

NCR wishes you a light-filled Christmas

by Tom Roberts

Dec 7, 2019

NCR Connections: "Light is not so much what you directly see as that by which you see everything else." With gratitude to Franciscan Fr. Richard Rohr for that beautiful line from his latest book, it seems a fitting frame for the season and for the era.

Thomas Doyle is seen in an August 2018 photo. (AP Photo/PA Wire/Niall Carson)

Thomas Doyle traces the disintegration of clerical/hierarchical culture

by Tom Roberts

Nov 27, 2019

NCR Connections: The clergy sexual abuse crisis "is evidence of a profound contradiction that reaches to the foundational core of the institutional church," the former Dominican told a Gonzaga University audience.

Columns ›

Use of wide-open location data, closed-door meetings hurt Catholics

Vulnerability as strength: Keenan's key to dismantling clericalism

NCR wishes you a light-filled Christmas

Thomas Doyle traces the disintegration of clerical/hierarchical culture

The Amazon synod shows the way forward for the US church

Presenting NCR's EarthBeat

On capitalism, women, the Amazon — a world of Catholic conversations

Francis takes John Paul II's 'Be not afraid!' to new levels

Cokie Roberts: trailblazing journalist, Catholic citizen, 'the real deal'

It's not about ethics, it's about how we imagine God

Cardinal-elect was a Francis bishop before Francis

Polls can't capture our understanding of the Eucharist

'Both sides' is a lie that enables white nationalism, threatens Latinos

Look for lay involvement that transcends the ideological divide

A sense of in between

NCR receives top honors from the Catholic Press Association

New ways of being church, in the public square and in the chanceries

Cycles of coverage, clerical culture, generational trends

Hierarchy and the need for a 'culture of vulnerability'

Not failing, but changing: US Catholic life in a new era

We're waiting on the decision about women deacons

God speaks to us through creation

A mensch, a church in recovery, and hierarchical culture examined

Bishops must look within their own culture

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