Feeding Tubes and Defibrillators

Rev. Tarris Rosell and sister Rosemary Flanigan

Let’s begin with two stories about the growing and important field of bioethics. The first is from Ryan Pferdehirt, the newly named Flanigan Chair in Bioethics at the Kansas City-based Center for Practical Bioethics. A hospital once asked him to consult on a bioethics case in which a son thought his desperately ill, hospitalized mother…

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Sharpening Teeth of Acclaimed KC-Based Catholic Watchdog

Veteran investigative journalist James Grimaldi is photographed in Washington, Wednesday, Sept. 5, 2024. (Photo/J. Scott Applewhite)

A national (and international) Kansas City company has a new leader who grew up here but doesn’t live here now and may never call Kansas City home again. James Grimaldi began a few months ago as the new executive editor of The National Catholic Reporter, an award-winning, progressive newspaper voice for Catholicism. Given Grimaldi’s long…

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Aging KCK Congregation Bequeaths Building to Serve Youth

The Argentine Mennonite Church has focused for decades on serving the needs of youth. By giving its building to the Youthfront agency, that mission is continuing. (Bill Tammeus | Flatland)

Across much of the nation in recent decades, shrinking churches have confronted the painful question of whether they can afford to maintain a building for worship and other activities. Time and again the answer has been no. Sometimes that means finding other places in which to continue offering worship. But often it means either abandoning…

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Truth, Religion and the Demise of Local Newspapers

When I started reporting at The Kansas City Star in late 1970, it was a regional newspaper that served not just the metro area but also east to mid-Missouri, west to central Kansas, and beyond. I was part of a staff of hundreds, and the paper’s circulation — all print then, of course — was…

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Clergy Sex Abuse Survivor Reflects on His Reform Work

St. Peter's Basilica, Vatican City

A 2002 series of Boston Globe articles turned a scandal about Catholic priests who sexually abuse children (and bishops who protect those priests) into a national story. The Globe, however, wasn’t the first newspaper to expose this reprehensible crime. Credit for that goes to the independent, Kansas City-based National Catholic Reporter. NCR was writing about…

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