Towards a morally sustainable future

In this edited extract from a speech given in Rome this week at a seminar on climate change organised by the Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace, Britain?s Environment Secretary argues that there is an ethical and moral dimension to combating the effects of global warming...

Russia?s tormented revolutionary

Boris Yeltsin, who died this week, leaves an extraordinary legacy. He understood what was at stake in the fight against Communism, and was brave enough to defeat it. But his mistakes have allowed President Putin to turn the clock back on democratic reform...

Closure of the eternal waiting room

Discussion of the existence of limbo, following this month?s publication of the Vatican?s International Theological Commission?s views on the fate of unbaptised babies, is unnecessary, says a Catholic historian: what should be debated is the nature of original sin...

Temptations of the flesh

Adultery and suspicion of infidelity are so common in our distrustful culture that half of divorce cases involve evidence provided by private detectives. Opportunity may be part of the cause but so is a failure to understand what relationship means....

A new breed

Any notion of a traditional path to the priesthood no longer applies in today?s world, with men of a variety of ages and backgrounds joining seminaries in encouraging numbers, writes Christopher Lamb. Here, in the first of two articles to mark Vocation Sunday on 29 April, the current generation of priests in training describe how they came to hear the calling, and their experience of formation...

Of a quite different order

The new religious Community of Our Lady of Walsingham is the order that likes to say ?yes? ? obedience, silent prayer, poverty and the rosary are in, but so are chilling out and trips to the movies. A distinctive departure from other orders, its statutes are designed to use the gifts of women more fully...

Iron Lady of India

Inspired by the passive resistance of Mahatma Gandhi more than 60 years ago, a young woman is willing to lay down her life by fasting in protest against government-sanctioned human rights abuses rife in north-east India...

Seeing is believing

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