If the church that hosted my first Alcoholics Anonymous meeting had been Catholic, I wouldn’t have gone near it. The religion I had been brought up in made me so angry in those days that I boycotted it in any way I could. But since the church was Presbyterian, I condescended to take a rear sea

It may be imprudentand impudentfor this reviewer who teaches at Benedictine institutions to suggest that readers of a Jesuit journal have much to learn from a Dominican Timothy Radcliffe who recently finished a term as master general of the Dominicans and was rumored as a successor to Cardinal B

Eighteen Christmas poems by the late Joseph Brodsky Russian migr American citizen Nobel laureate and our laureate as well Eighteen poems collected and translated from the Russian by some of the best poets writing in English including Seamus Heaney Derek Walcott Richard Wilbur Anthony Hec

Behind the cheerful bustle of New York City's Chinatown, with its outdoor stalls filled with exotic fruits and vegetables, lie deep-seated problems that reflect the difficult lives of Chinese immigrants who manage to find their way to lower Manhattan. I had an opportunity to hear of some of thes

Our neighborhood on the west side of San Antonio was an impenetrable Tex-Mex barrioisolated by culture, religion, language and educationuntil Old Doc Stein came along. He was a feisty, stocky man with dark, compassionate eyes, thick lips, wiry white hair, and he spoke massacred Spanish. Ambling into

Beliefs and DialogueI read with interest and appreciation the article by Patrick J. Ryan, S.J., The Roots of Muslim Anger (11/26). As a Catholic Christian Arab with a fair knowledge of Islam, I appreciate the scholarship Father Ryan devoted to this article. While I believe all his points are valid,

A single tree grows on a wilderness hillside in Northern California. Its name is presidio manzanita. Its world population is one. When I stood before a photograph of this tree in an exhibit of endangered species recently, I felt its enormous fragility. Should it die without reproducing itself, presi

Since Sept. 11 not a day has passed without reminders of the tragedy being thrust before us. Grief, loss and mourning remain part of our national consciousness, like a dull ache that sometimes becomes acute. Advent, Christmas and the coming of a new year, the first without lost loved ones, will be a