Societies fall apart if they lose their fundamental beliefs. There are some signs of this throughout the world - for example, the increasing instability of marriage; competitiveness to the neglect of everyone and everything except work; inequities and discrimination; the fixation on materialism; the deadening impact of mindless jobs; an increase in the number of single parents, mostly mothers, who must work to live; the failure of schools to prepare children for productive, satisfying lives; coarsening of society"s attitude toward love and sexuality; an increase in violent behavior. To survive, we have to escape from a mentality which sees society as just a mass of individuals placed side by side without any concern or responsibility for one another. There are fundamental moral values on which all societies depend, such as respect for truth, for justice, for compassion, for care of the environment, and above all for the sacredness of human life. This current volume is entitled Thirst for Life because the gospels for this portion of the Church year (weeks one through nine in the Church"s Ordinary Time) are mostly from St. Mark, whose gospel, through the active Jesus on the move, shows a thirst for life - divine life - treasured, sought, and given, then and now.