Of Many Things

"They call me the Manhole Cover Lady,” says Diana Stuart, author of Designs Under Foot: The Art of Manhole Covers in New York City (Design Books, 2003). After attending her lecture on what might seem a curious topic, I spoke to her about her book and how she came to write it.Like most New

Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori. "It is a beautiful honor to die for one’s country.” In this famous line, the Roman poet Horace gave lasting expression to an ideal of republican virtue inherited from an age when citizen soldiers defended their homeland against its enemies. Even

They say you can stay on the subway all night.” So commented a middle-aged homeless man to me on a particularly cold evening at a subway station in the Manhattan neighborhood of East Harlem. Warmly bundled up myself, I was sitting on a bench facing the tracks and noticed him because he was sta

I was startled. One of my Jesuit confreres had just introduced me to a fellow graduate student, not by name but as “our superior.” We were classmates; we lived in a small community, but somehow I had turned from Drew into “Father Superior.” I was no longer an individual. I wa

Taking a subway from one island to another—that is something you can do only in a place like Manhattan. Manhattan itself is an island, and I was going from there to Roosevelt Island just across the East River. Coming up the long escalators from subterranean depths, I was stunned to see the riv

St. Paul would not have been surprised by the clash of opinions aroused by Mel Gibson’s movie “The Passion of the Christ.” At the beginning of his First Letter to the Corinthians, Paul alluded to the controversy he himself encountered when he proclaimed “Christ nailed to the

Pilgrimage has rarely been easy. Storms and shipwrecks, robbery and kidnaping, wars and illness were endured, not to mention the self-imposed disciplines: walking barefoot, fasting, begging for hospitality or passage. In his day, after enduring three and a half months of storm-tossed travel while re

Institutional cultures are notoriously hard to change, whether the institution is a corporation, a university or a not-for-profit organization. Those who are comfortable with unquestioned assumptions and accustomed ways of doing things are not likely to recognize the need for change, even when the i

As letters to America go, this one was nothing special. A Catholic physician had written to argue for a married Catholic clergy, listing a number of familiar arguments, including the superior ability of married Protestant ministers to relate to their congregations, the equivocal witness of early chu

Sister Helen Prejean once again last fall spent several days with us at America House. She was in New York in November to consult with the actor-playwright Tim Robbins about the stage version of her book Dead Man Walking. She found time to stop by my office to speak about this latest reincarnation o