Of Many Things

It’s almost a matter of pride among today’s journalists to show contempt for theology. When The Times’s Thomas Friedman wants to ridicule some proposal as ideological, captious or absurd, he refers to it as driven by “theology.” In contrast, cultural critics like Louis

As this issue goes to press, we are a little over three weeks removed from the day terror struck. It has been a time of intense and widespread prayer on both small and grand scales. We hear people constantly talking about faith, about the comfort they find knowing that God hears. Such was a conversa

We want to thank all our readers and friends who expressed their sympathy and concern in numerous letters and e-mails. In the aftermath of the terrorist attack on the World Trade Center, it was good to know that we had friends praying for us all over the world.Our residence-office building is about

Sept. 11, 2001, will forever be etched in the consciousness of all living Americans, but assuredly in a unique way for New Yorkers and Washingtonians. In New York, a variant of the question, “Where were you when the lights went out?” is asked and pondered citywide. For me, the answer is

If you think it must be hard to be homeless in a big city, imagine how much harder it is to be not only homeless, but also elderly and mentally ill. Yet 47 people in this painful situation have found a caring and permanent home at Fleming House in New York City’s Chelsea area. Most had previou

My first encounter with homelessness came when I was 10 or 12. Passing a friend’s house in my hometown in Maryland late one summer afternoon, I was amazed to see two people sound asleep at the edge of the wooded lot next door: a man and a woman who evidently had no place to stay for the night.

Faced with a growing pro-democracy movement led by intellectuals, journalists and the labor movement, King Mswati III of Swaziland (a small African country surrounded by South Africa and Mozambique) has cracked down on dissent and declared a state of emergency. Press censorship, arrest of dissidents

Architects can poison your faith. I found that out between 1960 and 1962, when I lived in a huge seminary the Jesuits had recently built about an hour’s drive north of New York City. The seminary was what Le Corbusier once called a “machine for living”; it had all the charm of Sovi

Visiting Cemeteries might seem an odd way to spend a vacation. As an obsessive, lifelong English major, however, I have an interest in the final resting places of those who made notable contributions to literature. During a week’s respite in the Boston area, I accordingly spent several hours a

How did it happen that Christianity—which prided itself on its expansive love, extended even to enemies—should itself resort to violence? “More Christians,” writes Paula Fredriksen in a recent review (The New Republic, 6/18) of H. A. Drake’s Constantine and the Bishops: