The Christian Century

(RNS) Penn State coaching legend Joe Paterno is out in the university's burgeoning sex abuse scandal, and comparisons to the Roman Catholic Church's own abuse scandals are in.

Is legalized abortion akin to the Nazi Holocaust? The analogy is a standard talking point among abortion opponents, and a new half-hour video by a prominent Christian apologist has gone viral by making the comparison more explicit and graphic than any antiabortion sound bite on the evening news.

Back in 1905, Max Weber's landmark treatise, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, ar­gued that a Calvinist belief in God's plan for the saved was crucial to the rise of capitalism because it inspired individuals to work hard and earn money as a sign of divine blessing on their lives.

(RNS) Just days after prominent anti-abortion activist Rev. Frank Pavone was ordered to suspend his work as head of Priests for Life, Pavone and his bishop, Patrick J. Zurek of Amarillo, Texas, are seeking a way out of the tense standoff.

Every four years, the U.S. Catholic bishops publish a detailed statement about how Catholics should think about key political issues in light of church teachings.

(RNS) The shock of the 9/11 attacks was so great, and the personal losses so deep, that many people understandably sought simple answers for such overwhelming malevolence.

What, they asked, would cause someone to hijack a plane of innocent civilians and fly it into a building?

(RNS) Sending a small band of young people to talk about condoms at orld Youth Day, the triennial Catholic jamboree that opens in Madrid on uesday (Aug. 16), sounds like penance, if not a kind of martyrdom.