Soaring energy prices rapidly turned last winter into a season of severe discontent. In the Northeast the price of residential heating oil rose by more than 50 percent since the previous winter. In the Midwest homeowners paid at least 60 percent more for natural gas. In California households braced

The statistics from Sudan appall any decent observer. In the last 17 years, two million persons have been killed, four million have been internally displaced and hundreds of thousands made refugees. Yet the West seems to evince little interest in the hidden holocaust that is consuming Southern Sudan

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