SAN DIEGO – When Dennis Quaid agreed to star in the new film “Soul Surfer,” it represented a career first: the only time the actor had ever accepted a role before reading the script.Read More

ST. PAUL, Minn. – Four years ago, Carmen Dean couldn’t have imagined the crowd that would fill her church, Risen Savior in Burnsville, to celebrate the Dec. 12 feast of Our Lady of Guadalupe, patroness of the Americas.Read More

There’s a story told of a small town prosecuting attorney calling his first witness to the stand in a trial. She was an elderly, grandmotherly woman. He approached her and asked: “Mrs. Jones, do you know me?”Read More

The campus of Good Samaritan Hospital, Baltimore, a member of MedStar Health, Inc., is tobacco-free effective Nov. 20. In an effort to be a model of healthy behavior, and for the safety and well-being of patients, employees and visitors, tobacco products have been banned from all MedStar locations on a date coinciding with the national...Read More

WASHINGTON – At a time when federal budget decisions “involve hard choices and much shared sacrifice,” a decision on whether to fund the Planned Parenthood Federation of America “is not one of those hard choices,” the chairman of the U.S. bishops’ Committee on Pro-Life Activities told members of Congress.Read More

ROME – Despite years of economic hardship and violence in Iraq, the Dominican Sisters of St. Catherine of Siena are working in the country to promote human rights, said an Iraqi nun.Read More

Dr. Habib Malik of the Lebanese American University has been a friend for many years. Few men have such an informed and humane view of the sad, even desperate, position of Christians in the Middle East. As a Lebanese Maronite with a Harvard doctorate in intellectual history, what Dr. Malik knows comes from experience as...Read More

VATICAN CITY – The foundation upon which the Universal Declaration of Human Rights is based will remain fragile if its ethical and divine origins are ignored, Pope Benedict XVI said during a Vatican commemoration of the document’s 60th anniversary.Read More