NCR Today is the group blog of NCR. Each member of our diverse team of bloggers writes on different topics, including the politics of the church and secular society (and the interaction between the two), culture, management of the church and more.
Pope Francis awakened the global financial establishment Thursday he will not be shy in criticizing greed and the greedy, especially when that greed comes at significant cost to the poor of the world.
In the 30th tweet of his ponfiticate, a tweet being called "the tweet heard around the world," Francis wrote: "My thoughts turn to all who are unemployed, often as a result of a self-centered mindset bent on profit at any cost."
"Midnight's Children"
Indian/Canadian director Deepa Mehta's cinematic interpretation of Salmon Rushdie's 1981 Booker Prize-winning novel "Midnight's Children" is a vibrant epic that spans about 30 years and has a cast of thousands.
The Pew Research Center's in-depth look at Islam is based on 38,000 face-to-face interviews in more than 80 languages covering 39 countries. Anyone who covers religion ought to read this study, not to mention public policy makers.
Below are a five takeaways as reported in a CNN story:
"The patriotic thing, the American thing, the human thing to do here is to close Guantanamo," writes U.S. Air Force veteran Col. Morris Davis, who on Wednesday posted an online petition that calls for closing the military detention facility.
Not an insignificant number of Catholics like to claim that The New York Times is anti-Catholic in its reporting and editorializing. Such claims are often accompanied by a fundraising pitch of one kind or another. I don't view the Times as anti-Catholic. On Wednesday, the National Day of Prayer, the Times had an interesting perspective on prayer.
NCR Today: News from Chicago, Columbus, Detroit, Brisbane and Melbourne. Plus more.
Paulist Press has published a book by Abbot Martin Werlen, who compared the church to an ash heap that he knows contains embers waiting to be ignited.
NCR Today: It turns out Pope Francis is not a big fan of capitalism, which he says fosters "a civilization of consumerism, of hedonism."
NPR's "Weekend Edition" ran a story about the Qalandia checkpoint between Jerusalem and the West Bank. Amid stone-throwing boys and tear-gas-shooting soldiers, an Arab peddler was selling ice cream. I've been across that checkpoint, and I had a vivid image of the scene. It made me think about pundit complaints that protesters don't use nonviolence. And it reminded me of rock-throwing in Northern Ireland.
As immigration continues to be a hot-button issue, Catholic comedy show host Stephen Colbert takes on an Iowa hospital deporting undocumented workers back to their countries in a segment of "The Colbert Report" called "The Word."
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