According to a recent newsletter of the Administration on Aging, I have something in common with 12 million Americans. I’m a caregiver. The great majority of us are women (75 percent, the A.O.A. reports). Half of us also work outside the home. This caregiving business is really booming. As the

Encuentro 2000 Celebrates Diverse U.S. ChurchEncuentro 2000 opened with Native American drums calling the participants from across the nation to gather in assembly. At the end of its final liturgy, 5,000 worshipers tied ribbons to one another’s wrists, a traditional Hmong sign of sending forth

Evaluated in ConscienceSister Jeannine Gramick’s unenviable situation (Signs of the Times, 6/17) calls to mind the dictum of St. Thomas Aquinas (envisioning, actually, an even more extreme situation): When an ecclesiastical decision that is evaluated in conscience as certainly unacceptable is

Memoirists rule the literary roosts these days but sometimes with a bad conscience Shouldn rsquo t they be writing poetry or at least novels if they are serious writers Isn rsquo t this retailing of their personal lives a knock-off item or maybe even a cheat a pretense of authenticity undercut

If one is looking for a book on grief and grieving based on lived experience rather than more remote psychosocial theories then Thomas Attig rsquo s How We Grieve is the resource to read Although it is not a brand new book first published in 1996 in this reviewer rsquo s opinion no book publish

The first time I realized that I was old, at least in the eyes of others, was when a young woman stood up in a crowded bus to give me her seat. Resisting that sobering message, I continued to think of the old as they, not we. The definitive change came only a few years ago at Bethany, when I was wel

Kent State is my American Jerusalem. Ever since I stopped at the campus on a whim while driving across Ohio in 1993, I have made yearly pilgrimages to this sacred-secular ground of antiwar activity, where four students died and nine were injured. But I’m no nostalgic baby boomer, no former rad

The timing could not have been more appropriate: On the first day of the annual conference in Washington, D.C., of the National Low Income Housing Coalition, the Department of Housing and Urban Development released its report to Congress on worst-case housing needs. The title itself goes to the hear

In the last few years, I have become increasingly involved with death. This involvement has come from three sources: my clinical practice as a physician specializing in geriatrics, my work as a Jesuit priest at an academic medical center and my own attempts as an educator to improve the care of the

Six years have passed over the Holy See since 1870, and its organization has been dying out year after year. All this darkness, confusion, depression, inactivity and illness, made me understand the Tristis est anima mea usque ad mortem [My soul is sorrowful even unto death].The author of these words