Feature
Health of the Nation
A Deathbed Reflection on Catholic Social Teaching & Our Future Prospects
There isn't much to see on Interstate 35 on the long drive from Wichita, Kansas, through Oklahoma and on down to Austin, Texas. Once I passed the tollbooth on the outskirts of Wichita, there were only miles of flat prairie, mostly fields plowed up for the spring planting. I had plenty of time to think about what I had been doing, and what I had been reading.
Seven days earlier, I had flown to Wichita to help my wife take care of her dying sister Phyllis. By many measures of the world, Phyllis had led a fortunate life. Her husband had a well-paying job that enabled them to live in a large, comfortably furnished house and send their son to an exclusive private school. But she had known misfortune as well. After she had borne two daughters, her first marriage ended in divorce. Phyllis's first husband was the kind of Christian who gives Christianity a bad name. When she divorced him, she also divorced organized religion of any kind and never looked back.
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more on catholic from the online archives
29.3—May/June 2016
A Deathbed Reflection on Catholic Social Teaching & Our Future Prospects by Karl D. Stephan
24.5—Sept/Oct 2011
A Critical Memoir of Thomas Merton at Gethsemani Abbey by Patrick Henry Reardon
35.4—Jul/Aug 2022
The Death Rattle of a Tradition
Contemporary Catholic Thinking on the Question of War by Andrew Latham
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more from the online archives
22.3—April 2009
Neil Postman's Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business by J. Daryl Charles
