Of Many Things

Months ago a friend sent me an article from The Atlanta Constitution (10/22/06) about a man whose family I knew well when we all lived together at Koinonia Farm in Americus, Ga. Today Koinonia is known as the birthplace of Habitat for Humanity, but a generation ago it suffered the bitter distinction

As I rode Amtrak’s Regional from Washington to New York one cold February afternoon, I was reminded that for me one of the delights of train travel is getting the lay of the land. Gazing out the window, I had just noted how one semi-rural settlement lay on the flood plain, and I wondered how f

I hope you will not think it hopelessly chauvinistic if I suggest that we no longer celebrate St. Patrick’s Day but St. Patrick’s season, at least in the Northeast. On the day itself, March 17, New York City will hold its oldest and grandest parade. But because so many neighboring towns

Back in the 19th and early 20th centuries, when a group of like-minded individuals wanted to found a movement, they usually started by founding a magazine. The Atlantic Monthly was the brainchild of Oliver Wendell Holmes, Ralph Waldo Emerson and other Boston luminaries who wanted to create a place t

Jimmy Carter has spent a lifetime teaching Sunday school, a practice that instilled in him a deep attachment to the Holy Land. That bond led him to negotiate the 1978 Camp David accords between Israel and Egypt, the only peace initiative to have had a lasting impact on the shape of the Arab-Israeli

Walter M. Abbott, S.J., remembers the day in the early 1960’s. He was working in his room above the offices in the old America editors’ residence on West 108th Street in Manhattan, when a call came in from the real estate expert who had been looking for a more suitable building to house

Lent? Wasn’t it just Christmas? Catholics can be forgiven for sometimes scratching their heads over the liturgical calendar. While the liturgical year is designed to help Christians follow the life, death and resurrection of Jesus by meditating on the sequence of Gospel readings, sometimes it

Experts differ as to how the just war tradition should be applied to real-life conflicts. Hard as it may be to believe, some regard it as an academic exercise with no bearing on the real world. For others, it is a calculus for decision makers, with no relevance for others, whether other authorities

Books, like houses, can be remodeled. The house and garden sections of city newspapers often include articles about energetic people who have transformed a rundown farmhouse in the Catskills or a cabin in the Maine woods by knocking down walls between cramped rooms, installing new lighting and build

Nowadays when I read of Albania in the media, it is often in reference to Albanians who—desperate to escape their poverty-stricken country, where they are also beset by ethnic conflict—flee in rickety boats across the Adriatic Sea toward Italy. If they have not drowned or been intercepte