The North Star Catholic / EDITOR'S PICKS Archives - Page 169 of 170

Many Alaska youth are online addicts who need your help

Some of these teens express a mental and spiritual atrophy, coupled with loneliness and helplessness at the prospect of changing their behavior. As pleasure-seeking becomes habituated, the brain is re-wired, met by a heightened tolerance and increasing despair. It would be difficult to overstate the urgency or depth of this concern as it was revealed by many ACYC attendees. To witness the helplessness teens feel in resisting the temptation to play video games or text message is to wonder how they’ll fair in adult life.

Anchorage Catholic school’s science program gets boost

Religion and science are not opposed at Lumen Christi High School in Anchorage. The 7-12 grade Catholic school has built a reputation for innovative science curriculum, while also teaching the tenants of Catholic faith.
The school is hoping to further enhance its science program thanks to a $15,000 grant that teacher Debbie Brewer received earlier this year. Brewer was chosen to take part in a national program that forms mentoring partnerships between high school science teachers and research scientists.

Diversity in service to God brings unity

Parents have different roles from their children. Teachers have different roles from firefighters. Mothers have different roles from fathers. And individually we also have different personalities that play important roles. But — and this is the important part — amidst our diversity there is an underlying unity that holds us together.

Cathedral welcomes musical seminarian with love for evangelization

Seminarian Brother Thomas Aquinas Pickett, 25, is in Anchorage for his one-year field assignment — a period of training that all Dominican student brothers complete as part of their eight-year formation for the priesthood. A graduate of Gonzaga University and Bishop White Seminary, Brother Pickett has a bachelor’s degree in philosophy and a passion for utilizing creative ways to spread the Gospel.

Archdiocese lists licit activities for parishes during political season

Anchorage Archbishop Roger Schwietz has issued a list of allowable activities for parishes to engage in during the upcoming political season. The June 6 memo was sent to all parishes and agencies of the archdiocese to remind them of allowable activity during elections.

A sense of urgency for ‘Young Catholic America’

It’s safe to say that we live in a time when the historic message of Christianity is being drowned out and watered down. Hyper individualism has many believing they can reinvent and reorient their lives however they wish. Belief in fixed moral realities and religious truths are increasingly difficult to swallow and are more likely to be seen as naïve sentiments held by children and those who grew up in a simpler time.

Alaska Orthodox praise pope’s efforts for unity

Alaska’s Orthodox Christian leaders praised Pope Francis and applauded a series of recent high profile meetings between him and Orthodox Patriarch on Constantinople Bartholomew, but they also expressed guarded enthusiasm about whether the encounters constitute significant progress toward uniting the long-divided churches.

Clearing the air around legalizing marijuana

Part of the unethical character of drug abuse flows from the fact that we are treating something good, namely our personal, conscious experience as if it were an evil to be avoided. Recreational drug users seek to escape or otherwise suppress their lived conscious experience, and instead pursue chemically-altered states of mind, or drug-induced pseudo-experiences. Any time we act in such a way that we treat something objectively good as if it were an evil by acting directly against it, we act in a disordered and immoral manner.

Redemptorist priest Fr. David Tobin dies

Redemptorist Father David Tobin, who served for a time in the Archdiocese of Anchorage, died June 27 after a heart attack. He was 77.
In the 1960s, he helped run a popular summer camp, St. Theresa’s, from Our Lady of Perpetual Help Church on the Kenai Peninsula.

Cardinal visits Alaska: Says leaders must serve

In July Cardinal Orlando Quevedo, of the Archdiocese of Cotabato, Philippines, made his third visit to the Archdiocese of Anchorage and his first since Pope Francis made him a cardinal in February. The recent trip was part of the now decade-long Global Solidarity Partnership between Cardinal Quevedo and Anchorage Archbishop Roger Schwietz. The arrangement, which seeks to build solidarity and friendships between Catholics in Alaska and the Philippines, has resulted in several priests from Cotabato coming to serve in Alaska over the years.
While in Alaska, Cardinal Quevedo sat down with the Catholic Anchor to discuss the future of the partnership and his recent appointment as a cardinal.