An interview with the Chicago priest whose ambitious series makes its debut on PBS.

Dear Sister, My prayer experiences dont seem good enough or holy enough, long enough or intense enough. Do you have any suggestions as to how I can pray better?

The strongest case that Nice Fornicators make for themselves is that they are committed to one another in love, and that this commitment carries sufficient moral weight to justify their actions.

The Nice Fornicators, as far as it lies in them to do so, bring about a culture of hedonism, which is by its nature antithetical to something as self-sacrificing as marriage.

Theodore Dalrymple worked as a prison doctor and psychiatrist in Britain for 15 years. He's known serial killers, petty thieves and everything in between. As he puts it, with a mischievous grin, "I've probably spent more time in prison than the average murderer."

If we lined up all the major issues of Catholic social teaching and compared them to the Himalayas, the "dignity of the human person" would be Mount Everest the most magnificent and tallest peak dwarfing the rest.

Five years ago today (one day after 9/11s fifth anniversary), a soft-spoken, 79-year-old former professor visiting his old university in Germany delivered a speech to a group of academics. In 30 minutes, it was all over. forty-eight hours later, the world exploded.

Pope John Paul II put his finger on a problem typical of our time, namely, that people think that they can do lots of bad things while still remaining, deep down, "good persons," as though their characters are separable from the particular things that they do.

In the end, of course, our challenge is not to change the teachings of Jesus and His Church to conform to our whims, but to change our lives to conform to His teaching.

Sometimes it takes a story of an entire Episcopal parish reuniting with Rome to remind us of what a gift we have in the person and office of the Successor of St. Peter.