Columns

As the daughter of a woman who prized her Irish heritage, I grew up believing that most of life’s problems could be solved over a comfortable cup of tea. When a crisis occurred in my family when I was a child, my mother’s first words were not “Call 911,” but rather “Put

For 60 seconds or so this past summer, I found myself on the dark side of a capsized kayak being swept along in treacherous, frigid waters. My eventual survival was a mixed blessing, for the whole experience had the predictable but unfortunate effect of intensifying my preoccupation with death. In t

My dad was a gambler. One of my earliest memories is seeing him checking the racing results in the newspaper and circling likely prospects for the next day’s betting. My father’s habit wouldn’t have been a problem had we been a rich family, but we weren’t. When he and my mom

It had to happen. Just as the shoemaker’s children go barefoot and the carpenter’s children live under a leaky roof, I knew this day would come. I am a church worker whose daughter has stopped going to church. My daughters have grown up with the church as their second home, because it wa

The question, “Where were you on Sept. 11?” ordinarily asks for your location on that date one year ago. But as we mark the anniversary, the question needs an important update: Where are you on Sept. 11, 2002? What has changed at ground zero—as dramatically chronicled in William La

Nearly six months ago, when each day’s front page brought more terrible news for the Catholic Church in the United States, I had a series of telephone conversations with several anguished Catholics in the Boston area. We talked about their anger, but we talked in equal measure about their fait

In the 1989 film National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation, Aunt Bethany (played by Mae Questal), the aunt of family patriarch Clark Griswold (Chevy Chase), travels to the Griswold family home in Chicago to celebrate Christmas. Clark asks Aunt Bethany, whose hearing is failing, to say grace before

St. Pancras Church in Glendale, a neighborhood in the New York City borough of Queens, is directly across the street from where I live. I have given up counting the number of services since Sept. 11 that ended with the wail of bagpipes. They signal sorrow, a reminder of senseless destruction and irr

I wonder if Jim Florio, the former Governor of New Jersey who became famous because he raised taxes, feels any better about his fate now that he has been included in Caroline Kennedy’s new book of modern profiles in courage. Florio took office in 1990 and found himself staring at a recession-b

Faith, hope and charity, I remember chanting obediently as a child, responding to a second-grade catechism question about virtues. I recall the nuns delving into elaborate detail about faith and charity, but barely skimming the surface of hope. If I were teaching a catechism class today, I would byp