Drew Christiansen

This is the season of parish closings, consolidations and reconfigurations. After watching the phenomenon at a distance for some years, it has finally struck home for me with a one-two punch. Late this spring the Archdiocese of New York announced the closure of my boyhood parish, St. Paul on Staten

In some ways I am an old-school Jesuit. In a succession of assignments and apostolic responsibilities, I have lived by St. Ignatius Loyola’s perplexing maxim that he preferred a man of self-denial to one of prayer. I am scandalized, but only slightly, by some young Jesuits’ need for the

Rachel Corrie was a 23-year-old peace activist from Seattle, Wash. On March 13, 2003, she was crushed to death by an armored Israeli bulldozer as she attempted to block it from demolishing a Palestinian home in Gaza. Crane’s Chicago Business recently reported that Caterpillar, the company that

It was the beginning of the fall academic term in 1974. I was meeting for a reading course with my doctoral adviser, Margaret Farley, R.S.M. At the end of the session, she said to me, “Bill Coffin has been meeting with the undergraduates about world hunger. I think you ought to go down to Dwig

In the previous Of Many Things column (4/24), Father Jim McDermott remarked how Easter, after the extended observance of Lent, can seem to come and go with barely any impact on believers. Because it demands more of us, Lent seems to draw our attention more dramatically. I have a different take on th

Spring can be an elusive season. In New England, many residents I know claim it doesn’t exist. All they know is “mud-time,” a dreary interlude between the long winter and a brief summer. The survey crews of my brother’s engineering firm groan with the very thought of slogging

Political liberals seem to have learned one lesson from the 2004 elections: Values, especially religious values, matter to the American people. There is a rush on to deny the religious right the moral high ground. Last year God’s Politics (HarperCollins), by Jim Wallis, the founder of Sojourne

Nancy Sherman is university distinguished professor of philosophy at Georgetown University. The author of Stoic Warriors (Oxford, 2005), she is currently working with patients at Walter Reed Medical Center in Washington. A few nights ago she spoke at the Carnegie Council for Ethics in International

Social movements sometimes grow slowly out of sight, like Mark’s “seed growing secretly,” and then burst forth suddenly with astonishing rightness, just made for the times. So it is with the Religious Campaign Against Torture (www.nrcat.org). George Hunsinger, a graduate school cla

The victory of Hamas in Palestinian elections two weeks ago sent the diplomatic world into turmoil. The United States and the European Union immediately demanded the victors renounce terrorism and recognize Israel’s right to exist or suffer the loss of economic aid. Later, the remaining two me