Of Many Things

It is a truism that Americans spend more than we need to and consume more than we have to. But doesn’t it seem that our desire to consume superfluous goods has lately grown to alarming proportions? The other day, for example, I caught a TV commercial for Fit. In case you’ve not yet been

One thing that no one told me before ordination was that I would start having what a Jesuit friend refers to as Mass nightmares.Mass nightmares are similar to the dreams everyone seems to experience during school years, and sometimes beyond. For example: you’re sitting unsuspectingly in a clas

There it was, Baltimore’s huge gulag of a jail and prison complex covering two and a half city blocks. I was looking at it from the northeast corner of St. Ignatius Church, where I was to give a talk on prison ministry that Monday evening; the sight served as a useful if painful inward prepara

The best show in New York City is not on Broadway. It’s the spectacular three-dimensional film Passport to the Universe at the Rose Center for Earth and Space, a surreal sphere-inside-glass cube recently erected behind Manhattan’s crusty old American Museum of Natural History.You take th

As I write this column, my Jesuit community is preparing to celebrate a number of jubilees, or anniversaries, for three Jesuit priests. The evening’s celebration will consist of what some wags refer to as an L.S.D., that is, liturgy, social and dinner.Apparently, one must be advanced in years

To walk where the young Henry James once walkedthat is what you can do if you are lucky enough to visit Linwood, a spiritual center near Rhinebeck, N.Y. The mid-19th-century owner of the property was Augustus James, Henry’s uncle. During his boyhood, Henry used to spend some of his summers the

If you are like me, you resent having your name on everyone’s mailing list, receiving direct mail of all sorts, mostly junk, and sometimes having your dinner hour interrupted with telephone solicitations. The scrupulous among us, however, not wanting to miss out on that one, real, authentic of

On Friday evening, Sept. 29, poets, musicians, theologians and friends gathered in the James Chapel at Union Theological Seminary in New York City to celebrate the life and work of the Orthodox priest Alexander Men. Among other delights, we heard from Father Men’s son Mikhail, currently vice g

Eileen Eganco-founder of Pax Christi USA and a long-time friend of Mother Teresa and Dorothy Daydied on October 7 at the age of 88. It was she, in fact, who introduced the two women, and near her casket at the funeral home was a photograph of the three women in conversation together at the Mary Cath

Maine’s secretary of state sponsors a Web page offering lively information about this largest of the six New England states. Maine has an area of 33,215 square miles that include 17 million acres of forest and 31,000 acres of blueberries. It has a human population of 1.2 million and a moose po