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

Hopkins seems to think the whole universe is wonderful. I have a friend who just told me yesterday he has brain cancer. What does Hopkins have to say to him? A student at Loyola University Chicago asked this question recently in a class on Victorian literature, during a discussion of the English Jes

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

Growth, growth, growth: this is the experience of Nativity-type middle schools—schools often based in whole or in part on a model developed at the Jesuit-sponsored Nativity Mission Center School in New York City, which began in 1971. Over three dozen schools are well established; others are ei

A religious sister friend has recently returned from a pilgrimage to sacred sites in eastern Europe. Among her most vivid impressions is the memory of a church in Gdansk, Poland. While the outside of the building had been fully restored and the church offered a full schedule of Masses and devotional

Several years ago, while I sat at my desk one morning at Continuum, an AIDS agency in San Francisco where I served as executive director, the phone rang. The caller identified herself as a secretary to the First Lady and asked if I would come to the White House for a community leaders’ forum l

Pilgrimage of ReconciliationOn a pilgrimage highlighted by bold ecumenical and interreligious gestures, Pope John Paul II reached across centuries of division to Orthodox Christians in Greece and Muslims in Syria. In Greece on May 4-5, the pope issued a dramatic apology for past treatment of the Ort

Samuel Kofi Woods II is an attorney who has been actively involved in human rights activities in Liberia since the mid-1980’s. He is the recipient of several awards, including the Benemerenti medal awarded by Pope John Paul II in 1999 and a human rights award from Reebok in 1994. He is also on

Urgent calls are going out once again for massive food and other humanitarian aid to Sudan. Yet a group of Catholic missionaries working in the “liberated areas” of South Sudan refuse to accept famine, human suffering and dependence on international charity as the permanent lot of Sudane