Of Many Things

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

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

The first cold day of the approaching winter found me at the Hoboken Shelter in New Jersey, the only shelter in that rapidly gentrifying city across the Hudson River from Manhattan (www.hobokenshelter.org). Housed in a 19th-century Lutheran church, the shelter has had as its guiding spirit for three

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

As we moved into the Easter season this year, I found myself thinking of a comment by the sacramental theologian Peter Fink, S.J., about how difficult it can be to get Catholics to pay attention to the Easter season. After 40 days of Lent and the Easter Triduum, people’s focus and imagination

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

"Daily life in Baghdad became very hard after the 1991 Persian Gulf war, especially when the sanctions went into effect,” said Sattar, “and it has continued to be hard ever since.” Sattar is an Iraqi who is now in New York City pursuing a master’s degree in engineering.