Of Many Things

When the Franciscans of the Holy Land elected their new superior last spring, they opted for renewal. The custos or guardian, so called because of the Franciscans’ traditional role in protecting the holy places, is a 39-year-old Italian priest, Pierbattista Pizzaballa. With just 14 years in th

Smoking began for me at 16. My friends started then too, and because it was forbidden on school grounds, the incentive of rule-breaking made it all the more attractive. After starting with Pall Malls and then Marlboros, I went on to Salems in graduate school, where any nonsmoking student was viewed

Central Park lies just a few blocks from America House, and no matter what the season, I sometimes walk there to join other office workers for lunch, on the grass in warm weather or on a bench. Preferring to be on the move, though, I continue on, sandwich in hand, to the center of the park’s 8

Sports physiologists talk of slow-twitch and quick-twitch muscles. Slow-twitch muscles are fit for events like weightlifting, quick-twitch muscles for sprinting. The world seems increasingly built for quick-twitchers. Video games raise the reaction times of young people to levels that even Tom Cruis

A cork-lined room—that was Marcel Proust’s way of coping with the street noises of early 20th century Paris while he was writing his classic, Remembrance of Things Past. But what about present-day New York City? The City Council issued a report late last year warning that subways are so

In the spring of 2002, thinking it would be fun, I offered to take over a sixth grade C.C.D. class in the Bronx for another Jesuit who had an unexpected conflict. Maybe it was a case of bright-eyed suburban boy meets already world-wearied urban sixth graders. Or maybe it was simply the fact that the

Critics have often asked, “When has the just-war theory ever led to the condemnation of a war?” Seldom, if ever, it would seem. As the Rev. J. Bryan Hehir has written, the Just War Theory provides reason “to pause analytically” before going to war, but an outright condemnatio

A hundred years ago, on the afternoon of Thursday, October 27, 1904, New Yorkers walked into various entrance kiosks of the city’s new Interborough Rapid Transit Company, headed down a flight or two of stairs, and took their very first rides under the sidewalks of New York, the transportation

I have poor circulation, and that makes my ankles swell,” said the woman in front of me, speaking in the soft accents of “the islands.” A heavy-set person in her 50’s, she explained this as we sat on our bags early one morning at the Port Authority bus terminal in New York Ci

Everyone recognizes that the sexual abuse crisis in the Catholic Church was not caused only by the sinful failures of individual priests; it was also caused by the failure of a number of bishops to deal appropriately with these priests. There were not just personal failures; there were also personne