Of Many Things

How do you go about learning Spanish in New York City if you live in a parish where most parishioners speak only that language? The question led me to enroll in a solidly useful program sponsored by the Archdiocese of New York. It meets three hours each week, and though far from fluency, I now manag

Now that your Christmas gifts are stored away (or returned), the Christmas tree ornaments are tucked away (or broken), and the Christmas tree needles are successfully vacuumed from your carpet (or not—in my family we’re still discovering in our shag, recreation-room carpet the needles fr

Finding books right before your eyes on the sidewalk: this is one of those phenomena you can encounter almost daily in New York City. Here in Manhattan I have had the good fortune to come across both paperbacks and hardbacks in my comings and goings. If you are an undiscriminating book lover like me

Our Christmas gift to subscribers this year is our new Web site. We are very excited about it and believe you will find it informative and useful. Come visit us at: www.americamagazine.org. On our Web pages, you will find practically everything that is currently printed in the paper edition of Ameri

Behind the cheerful bustle of New York City's Chinatown, with its outdoor stalls filled with exotic fruits and vegetables, lie deep-seated problems that reflect the difficult lives of Chinese immigrants who manage to find their way to lower Manhattan. I had an opportunity to hear of some of thes

As the church looks for new ways to respond to the needs of poor immigrants in urban areas like New York City, are there lessons we can learn from efforts to help earlier arrivals? Although The Godfather might lead us to believe that joining the Corleone family was the dream of every young Italian i

In the summer of 1219, Francis of Assisi traveled to Egypt with the hope of converting the Saracens from Islam to Christianity. He stayed with some crusaders, who told him his mission was impossible and could easily cost him his life. Francis ignored the warnings and managed to secure an audience wi

My mind stopped somewhere short of Washington’s resolute war planners. The equation of a tooth for a tooth, an eye for an eyeI have no heart for it. Nor does my mind close around the vague and faceless enemies that we have sent our aircraft carriers to pursue in the Middle Eastor farther east

Bangladesh lies on the other side of the world, but it came a bit closer when a missionary working there stopped by America House for a visit during a recent trip to the United States. Bill Christensen, a Marianist priest who has been in Bangladesh since 1986, founded the Institute of Integrated Rur

Paterson, N.J., is not a place name likely to strike a chord of recognition in the minds of Americans elsewhere in the country. Literary types might recall that the poet-physician William Carlos Williams had his office there, and that one of his most famous poems is named after this once-prosperous