Maine’s secretary of state sponsors a Web page offering lively information about this largest of the six New England states. Maine has an area of 33,215 square miles that include 17 million acres of forest and 31,000 acres of blueberries. It has a human population of 1.2 million and a moose po

Among the most enjoyable duties I have at a local Jesuit paris - hwhich you will be unsurprised to learn is named St. Ignatius Loyola - is running a book club for young adults. The parish started the group three years ago as a way of offering the young professionals crowd a chance to continue, if in

Walden Pond is, happily, still intact, despite efforts by developers to destroy its surrounding woods and thereby the pervading spirit of Henry Thoreau, who lived on its banks for a year in the mid-1840’s. During a vacation week spent in the Boston area this past summer, I traveled to the pond

One of the interests that I share with my father is a taste for what the British used to call ripping good yarns, that is, stories of high adventure. My father and I are far from alone in our interest. A glance at recent best-seller lists will reveal a surprising number of adventure tales nestled am

If saints were still chosen by popular acclamation, those of us who knew Edward Skillin, the late publisher of Commonweal magazine, would be shouting his name from the rooftops. Edward stopped going into the Commonweal office only two years ago, at age 94. He first joined the staff in 1933, as a you

What do you do when you can’t afford an out-of-town summer vacation? If you are a New Yorker living in Manhattan or one of the surrounding boroughs, you might spend an afternoon or a day at Coney Islandnamed by Dutch settlers after the word for rabbit, konijn, which abounded there in the 1600&