When Father John Parker was asked to say the benediction at the graduation rite for the Medical School of South Carolina he did what any Eastern Orthodox priest would do.

It's an opening familiar to millions of Americans. A New York resident is walking down the street, minding his own business maybe arguing with his spouse or chatting with a friend.

The violent protests in Tibet that began last week and have since spread across (and beyond) China are frequently depicted as a secessionist threat to Beijing. But the regime's deeper problem in the current crisis is neither ethnic nor territorial. It's religious.

Senator Barack Obama really has only one subject on which he has something important to say race in America. But what extraordinary things he does say on that one subject, and how marvelously he says them.

Having grown up on the North Shore of Chicago, I've long believed that there is only one perfect place on this planet and that is Wrigley Field.

In less than three weeks, 3,000 Catholics returned to the Church in the Diocese of Phoenix due to the effort of a new lay apostolate, CatholicsComeHome.org.

The very left-wing Catholic clericalism from which Obama hopes to derive votes in the fall served as the pretext for his leaving the Trinity United Church of Christ in Chicago.

At the Good Counsel shelters for homeless pregnant women in New York, yesterday was business as usual: pregnant moms getting ready to deliver, other mothers feeding their children, still others going off to school or training for new jobs.

This dialogue, like all Office Hours dialogues, is fiction, but it is based on actual events: the "second thoughts" of Theophilus' visitor closely resemble the real-life testimony of an ex-gay who is a friend of the author.

How I wish I'd been the proverbial fly on the wall watching the changing expressions on Barack Obama's face as Sarah Palin delivered her already-legendary speech at the Republican convention last Wednesday.