Why is the presidential election so close? Here are five reasons.

Robert David SullivanOctober 16, 2024

Republican presidential nominee former President Donald Trump speaks during an interview with Bloomberg News Editor-in-Chief John Micklethwait during an event with the Economic Club of Chicago, Tuesday, Oct. 15, 2024, in Chicago. (AP Photo/Evan Vucci)

Here in the blue bubble of New York City, I often hear people express puzzlement that polls show a close race for the White House between Kamala Harris and Donald J. Trump. This puzzlement is because so many things would seem to disqualify Mr. Trump from the presidency, including his frequent incoherence and strange behavior at public events, his “lying sprees” (as CNN calls them), his affection for dictators and “strongman” regimes, his promotion of racism and xenophobia, and his cruelty toward immigrants and other vulnerable groups (and what seems to be a determination to destroy the image of Americans as a caring people). Not least, there is the refusal of Mr. Trump and his running mate, Senator JD Vance, to accept the results of the 2020 election, which Mr. Trump lost to Joseph R. Biden Jr.

17 October 2024, The Tablet

The listening cardinal

by Maggie Fergusson

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Church decisions can sometimes be hard to comprehend, but in appointing Timothy Radcliffe a cardinal Pope Francis seems to have scored a bullseye.

IN THE MID-EIGHTIES, when Timothy Radcliffe was Prior of Blackfriars in Oxford, he was sometimes invited to preach to undergraduates at Sunday Mass. The chaplaincy was always fairly full, but once word got out that “Father Tim” was coming, it was packed. Here was a preacher of thrilling contradictions: orthodox but open-minded, humorous but deadly serious. He never seemed to want to be the centre of attention, but to “make himself transparent to the Lord”: “He must increase; I must decrease.” He quoted St Augustine: “God loves each of us as if there were only one of us.” Our hearts burned within us.

A new economy for people and the planet

 

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  Christine Schenk

A new economy for people and the planet

NCR Voices

Reading the book of nature in a time of climate crisis

 

October 17, 2024

Reading the book of nature in a time of climate crisis

Daniel P. Horan  ncr

Unlike at Francis' past synods, conservative resistance sits out this year's summit

 

View from the Vatican

Unlike at Francis' past synods, conservative resistance sits out this year's summit

Vatican

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  Christopher White

 

FaithFaith and ReasonNovember 2024 issue

The keys to a bishop’s role in a synodal church: collaboration and compassion

W. Shawn McKnightOctober 10, 2024

Bishops process to the altar in St. Peter's Square during the opening Mass of the second session of the Synod on Synodality on Oct 2, 2024 (CNS/Lola Gomez)

This essay is a Cover Story selection, a weekly feature highlighting the top picks from the editors of America Media.

Last June, I invited some young adult Catholics to my residence one evening for a discussion about the future of our parishes, our diocese and our church. They were in their 20s and 30s. Some were married, some still single. A few had young children at their homes here in Jefferson City, Mo., where they belonged to our cathedral parish.

At the time, we were beginning a small group discernment process created by our chancery staff. The process was designed to work across four sessions, guiding the faithful of our diocese to explore how the structures of our church can support their parishes as they seek to become thriving centers of charity and mercy—as revealed by Jesus in his teaching on the Beatitudes.

 

Brazilian Cardinal talks restoring women deacons, ordaining married men at synod press briefing

Carol Glatz - Catholic News Service October 15, 2024

Cardinal Leonardo Steiner of Manaus, Brazil, speaks during a press briefing on the synod at the Vatican Oct. 15, 2024. (CNS photo/Lola Gomez)

VATICAN CITY (CNS) -- The Synod of Bishops for the Pan-Amazon region, which met in Rome in 2019, paved the way for the current synod on synodality, said the region’s top cardinal.

Before the synodal process began in 2021, “We were a church on a mission, now we are a synodal church on a mission,” Cardinal Leonardo Steiner of Manaus, Brazil, said at a Vatican briefing Oct. 15. “The synod on the Amazon helped open up this experience (of synodalty) and the participation of everyone.”

The synod on synodality is more focused on how the entire church community can learn to listen, discern and respond to God’s will and carry out the mission of the church than at specific issues. But part of that is looking at ways to expand the role and responsibility of all the baptized in the life and mission of the church.

 

Arts & CultureCatholic Book Club

Avery Dulles, a giant of American Catholic theology

James T. KeaneOctober 15, 2024

Avery Dulles, S.J. (Wikimedia Commons)

Last Friday marked 62 years since the opening of the Second Vatican Council. Between reading commemorations of that anniversary and absorbing the constant flow of news from the ongoing Synod on Synodality in Rome—America has a whole squad there these days—I have felt a bit this past week like I am back in graduate school for theology. Parsing synodality in particular has required brushing up a little on ecclesiology, and sent me to the bookshelf for an old classic: Avery Dulles’s Models of the Church.