Of Many Things

My Irish grandmother spent her first 16 winters in the West Cork town of Newmarket, near Kanturk, on the border of County Kerry. Between her arrival in the United States in 1888 and my father’s birth in 1911, she returned to Ireland three times. In those days one could sail from Philadelphia t

I’m sort of a nut for the historical Jesus. Of course I’m a nut, or at least a fool, for Christ too, but as for my reading tastes, I much prefer books and articles about the Jesus of history than those on the Christ of faith. The historical (which can often read like detective stories) I

A mansion of 87 rooms, built on Long Island in the 1920’s, surrounded by spacious grounds—hardly the kind of setting in which you might expect to find a gathering of mostly middle-aged Hispanic men and women spending a weekend in prayerful silence. And yet there we were, a group of 14 ma

Fresh flowers, lighted candles, live music—can this be the soup kitchen that just hours earlier had fed 400? Yes, a humble church social hall in Lower Manhattan had been transformed to a scene of celebration. The celebration in early December marked the 20th anniversary of a group named the Un

On Dec. 4, seven weeks shy of her 94th birthday, my mother, Marie, was called home to God. In a way, it was rather unexpected, the final “complication” following a fall down a flight of stairs 10 days earlier (nothing broken, miraculously), then a brief bout with chest congestion. I got

Imagine a dark winter morning. A line of poorly dressed men—black, white, Latino—stretches alongside a 1920’s brick building on the Lower East Side of Manhattan. The building is the Holy Name Centre, and the men, most of them homeless, are waiting to take showers in the center&rsqu

Appalachia stands out as a section of the eastern United States long regarded as a symbol of poverty and exploitation. But as several visitors from Wheeling Jesuit University observed during a visit to America House, it also represents a proud people with a strong tradition and culture. The visitors

Sister Helen Prejean, author of Dead Man Walking, often stays at America House when she comes to New York. She was here last fall for the opening of the opera based on her book, which recounts her experiences as spiritual advisor to men on death row. What we spoke of, though, was not so much the ope

Good news from Africa may seem a rarity, but some did come our way when two visitors from Tanzania visited New York in September. One was the vice chancellor of St. Augustine University near Mwanza, on the shores of Lake Victoria—the Rev. Deogratias Rweyongeza, who handles the day-to-day runni