Of Many Things

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:

Down through the centuries, church bells have served a number of purposes: to warn the community of impending dangers, to mark celebratory occasions like weddings and sorrowful ones like death. With death by execution in mind, Dorothy Briggs, O.P., in Medford, Mass., has begun a national ecumenical

Once a month in the late afternoon, I take the subway uptown to Spanish Harlem. There, I celebrate Mass for a small community of sisters—the Religious of the Sacred Heart of Jesus. The subway leaves me at East 116th Street, and I walk on for several blocks through a world very different from m

My Jesuit province is in the process of “discernment,” as St. Ignatius liked to say. We’re attempting to map out the future of the Society of Jesus in New England—praying together about where God might be calling us, considering new ministries and evaluating our traditional o

Not long ago I stumbled upon a book by the late Bruce Chatwin, called What Am I Doing Here, a collection of essays about the most unlikely topics: North African politics, art curation, the experience of nomadic peoples, Peruvian archeology and the like, connected only by a single strand—Mr. Ch

My job at America is so enjoyable that sometimes I’m amazed that I get paid for it. Well, I don’t actually get paid for it, or rather, technically I do, though my salary is applied to the Jesuit community by virtue of my vow of poverty and, well…you know what I mean.Anyway, it’s

Everyone knows what a diary is, but a house diary? In earlier times, Jesuit communities kept handwritten records of the comings and goings of their members-their apostolic work, their daily lives, their neighborhoods. The Nativity Jesuit community on Manhattan’s Lower East Side has preserved a