Of Many Things

Walk, walk, walk says my cardiologist. And I do, mostly just as a way of getting home. But I also enjoy it, though the Manhattan tempo is so accelerated that what might be called walking easily becomes run, run, run. This adrenaline-driven tempo has transformed me into one of the legions of jaywalke

Our small caravan drove into Slavonski Brod, a war-torn Croatian city on the banks of the Sava River. It was July 1992, just after the first cessation of conflict in Croatia and at the beginning of the war in Bosnia. From the outskirts of the city, we could see heavy, black smoke rising from downtow

Tom Reese was almost always on the phone. As editor in chief of America, his job mainly entailed reviewing manuscripts, editing articles and proofreading galleys. In the midst of these duties, he also spent time, like any good editor, puzzling over ways to boost circulation and improve the magazine.

Even longtime readers of America may be unaware of the origins of this periodical. It was born in April 1909, during the worst days of the anti-Modernist crusade in the Catholic Church. Hysterical paranoia ran rampant, and Catholic intellectuals and writers were one after another accused of heresy b

We get lots of stuff at America: press releases from Catholic colleges, books from Catholic publishers and, of course, letters from subscribers both pleased and angry at what we publish. Mostly the letters are friendly, charitable and pleasant. Only rarely are they vituperative. Still, even nasty le

Deafness as a gift–that is how Paul Fletcher, a profoundly deaf British Jesuit, sees his situation in a world of mostly hearing people. I met Paul when he visited my Jesuit community in Manhattan before returning to England after completing his studies at Weston School of Theology in Massachusetts.

C. S. Lewis wrote of “Hamlet” that it was best to read the play like a small child. Children never tire of hearing stories over and over again. They relish atmosphere, and they never forget details that seem insignificant to adults. One of the joys of growing older, I find, is hearing an

Something important happened a few weeks ago, though you didn’t read about it in any newspaper, see it on television or hear about it on the radio. In fact, you didn’t hear about this at all: a small brass key was handed over to my mother by her neighbor across the street. But it was big

Delivering a hot meal to an elderly woman in a public housing project is how my Saturday afternoons begin. Her meal and hundreds of others are prepared in the basement of a Manhattan church. Most are eaten right there, but enough are set aside to accommodate shut-ins as part of a program informally