In March 2010, I traveled to Bagaces, Costa Rica, for a weeklong service project with a dozen college students and a colleague. Volunteer programs, service learning and weeklong service trips are now commonplace on American college campuses. These programs offer students powerful opportunities to en
For decades now, popes and episcopal conferences have been insisting that to work for peace is the vocation of all Christians. Too often, however, peacemaking seems the domain of special vocations or technical specialists. This is certainly not the church’s hope. As Pope John Paul II proclaime
How to choose from the bountiful treasury of images awaiting our contemplation (and sheer delight) in this darkening season before Christmas? Do you prefer Netherlandish precision and detail? Italian tenderness and warmth? The classical proportions and palette of Poussin? The transcendent simplicity
The Christmas season is a time for thanks, so on behalf of all of us at America: Thank you.
Not A Choice“The Loneliest Choice” (12/1), by the Rev. Rhonda Mawhood Lee, disappointed me greatly. While pastoral reflection on suicide remains a crucial topic, the article seems to hark back to pre-Enlightenment days, when there was little understanding of grave mental illness. Fo
In some sense the Christmas story is one of borders. The Gospel of Luke tells us that the Holy Family’s journey begins with a population divided, a census of “the whole world...each to his own town” (2:1-3). And, in the Gospel of Matthew, Mary and Joseph travel to Bethlehem, then f
