Talking About “The Things That
Matter Most” on December 26
COUNTDOWN OF THE TOP 40 INTERVIEWS OF 2013
4:00 - #27 – What to Expect
When No One's Expecting: America's Coming Demographic Disaster
Look around you and think for a minute:
Is America too crowded? For years, we have been warned about the looming danger
of overpopulation: people jostling for space on a planet that’s busting at the
seams and running out of oil and food and land and everything else. It’s all
bunk. The “population bomb” never exploded. Instead, statistics from around the
world make clear that since the 1970s, we’ve been facing exactly the opposite
problem: people are having too few babies. Jonathan
Last is here to explain why the population implosion happened and how
it is remaking culture, the economy, and politics both at home and around the
world. Because if America wants to continue to lead the world, we need to have
more babies.
4:40 – #26 - Things
Continue to Go Downhill With the LCWR
In his first address to representatives of U.S.
Catholic sisters since his appointment in April 2012, the archbishop tasked by
the Vatican to oversee their leadership group reportedly had little to offer
regarding the reason for Vatican concern or how the process goes forward. Leaving
last Thursday’s closed-door meeting between Seattle Archbishop J. Peter Sartain
and the Leadership Conference of Women Religious (LCWR), several sisters said
they felt frustration at the lack of detail given by the prelate nearly 19
months into his mandate. Sartain met Thursday afternoon with some 825 LCWR
members, who are representatives of orders of Catholic sisters around the
country. The Vatican’s Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith has named the
prelate the group’s “apostolic delegate” and given him wide power to revise its
statutes and programs. Ann Carey, author of “Sisters in Crisis,” joins us.
5:00 - #25 - The Global Public Square: Religious
Freedom and the Making of a World Safe for Diversity
How do we live with our deepest
differences? In a world torn by religious conflict, the threats to human
dignity are terrifyingly real. Some societies face harsh government repression
and brutal sectarian violence, while others are divided by bitter conflicts
over religion's place in public life. Is there any hope for living together
peacefully? Os Guinness argues
that the way forward for the world lies in promoting freedom of religion and
belief for people of all faiths and none. He sets out a vision of a civil and
cosmopolitan global public square, and how it can be established by championing
the freedom of the soul—the inviolable freedom of thought, conscience and
religion. In particular he calls for leadership that has the courage to act on
behalf of the common good. Far from utopian, this constructive vision charts a
course for the future of the world. Soul freedom is not only a shining ideal
but a dire necessity and an eminently practical solution to the predicaments of
our time. We can indeed maximize freedom and justice and learn to negotiate
deep differences in public life. For a world desperate for hope at a critical
juncture of human history, here is a way forward, for the good of all
5:40 – #24 - What
Are Church Leaders From the Pope to Nuns on the Ground Saying About Possible
International Intervention in Syria?
Pope Francis has renewed his call
for peace in Syria, urging international leaders to “find a solution to a war
that sows destruction and death.” The secretary of the Pontifical Council for
Justice and Peace said that “the conflict in Syria has all the ingredients to
explode into a war of global dimensions.” The Patriarch of the Maronite
Catholic Church and the Greek Orthodox Patriarch of Antioch emphasized in a joint
statement that they are “opposed to any foreign armed intervention in Syria.”
Also Pope Francis has called upon all the faithful worldwide to join in a day
of prayer and fasting of September 7 for peace in the Middle East, and
especially in Syria. We talk with Matthew
Bunson about what the Universal Church is saying about military
intervention in Syria.
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