Eileen Eganco-founder of Pax Christi USA and a long-time friend of Mother Teresa and Dorothy Daydied on October 7 at the age of 88. It was she, in fact, who introduced the two women, and near her casket at the funeral home was a photograph of the three women in conversation together at the Mary Cath

What type of work have you been doing with refugees in Tanzania?Our presence in the camps as a team of Jesuit Refugee Service is first of all a service of presenceto be present to our sisters and brothers who are suffering in exile. It must be remembered that the majority of the refugees in all thre

Walden Pond is, happily, still intact, despite efforts by developers to destroy its surrounding woods and thereby the pervading spirit of Henry Thoreau, who lived on its banks for a year in the mid-1840’s. During a vacation week spent in the Boston area this past summer, I traveled to the pond

What do you do when you can’t afford an out-of-town summer vacation? If you are a New Yorker living in Manhattan or one of the surrounding boroughs, you might spend an afternoon or a day at Coney Islandnamed by Dutch settlers after the word for rabbit, konijn, which abounded there in the 1600&

Why would a Jesuit be taking part in a Quaker worship service? Yet that is what I was doing one Sunday in May. After celebrating the 8:30 a.m. Mass at Nativity parish on New York’s lower East Side, I walked a dozen blocks up Second Avenue to the 15th Street Meeting House. A

The timing could not have been more appropriate: On the first day of the annual conference in Washington, D.C., of the National Low Income Housing Coalition, the Department of Housing and Urban Development released its report to Congress on worst-case housing needs. The title itself goes to the hear

Here in America, I’ve watched mothers in the kitchen after a meal throw away more food, and better food, than I might eat in Russia in a week.... And I simply can’t help staring when people leave their plates half full, as they do so often in restaurants. Who wrote these words, and when?

Two opposing tides are at work in the world of immigration in the United States. On the one hand, the harsh provisions of the 1996 immigration lawthe Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigration Responsibility Acthave made the lives of both documented and undocumented immigrants more difficult. On the

When did your anti-sweatshop work begin?We began our labor rights activities in Latin America in the early 1990’s in El Salvador and Honduras. One of our first projects was to help a local human rights organization in Honduras, called the Committee for the Defense of Human Rights, to do a surv

I’ve already read that, someone answered when I asked whether he had read Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina. What did you think of it? Oh, it was so long ago I can’t rememberit was in college, came the answer. Why not read it again, then? A blank look, as if to imply that it would be a waste