Of Many Things

Years ago the last editorial The Sunday New York Times ran each week was an essay on the changing seasons. As a boy I would page through the Week in Review section to read the weekly sketch of natural history. I identified with the writer’s fascination with the natural world, and read in the h

On this fifth anniversary of the attack on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, I have many memories of Sept. 11, 2001. Images flicker in the back of my mind when I am on the way to the airport or gazing up at a skyscraper on a blue-sky day. I expect the news stations this week will offer a nons

Inspirational stories are not what you would expect to find in the Money and Business section of the Sunday New York Times. Its articles are generally of the dollars and cents kind. But a few years ago, paging quickly through that Sunday’s business section, I began to notice a regular column c

Now I get it. Or at least part of it. The prospect of not raising children was not a big deal for me when I entered the Jesuits. It wasn’t a deal at all, really. And, over time, while I calculated (almost daily) the difficulty of going through life without one special person to stand by my sid

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

Children’s books: why would a senior citizen like me be reading them? And yet I recently read several at quite a clip. This is because a Xaverian brother named Leonard, who teaches reading at a Jesuit middle school near my parish, lent me half a dozen. Leonard often tells me about them during

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

Backpacks did not figure in my life as a child. At school in Maryland, most students either carried their books in simple satchels of various sizes and shapes made of imitation leather or, in high school, symmetrically arranged on three-ring binders balanced against the hip. Even when theology studi

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

"Pas de vitesse," said our instructor in Italian-accented French. Then in English, "No rushing." I was one of several men being trained to work as a volunteer in the baths at Lourdes last month, and I was worried. This was my third visit to the French town of Lourdes, where the V