"Daily life in Baghdad became very hard after the 1991 Persian Gulf war, especially when the sanctions went into effect,” said Sattar, “and it has continued to be hard ever since.” Sattar is an Iraqi who is now in New York City pursuing a master’s degree in engineering.

"Ruined for life”—that is the humorously ironic phrase used of young women and men who give one or two years of their lives to service in the Jesuit Volunteer Corps. The phrase was coined by Jack Morris, the Jesuit credited with having started it all—of whom more later. Althou

"Our daily Mass was at the center of all we did,” said one of the Christian activists who set out for an 11-day pilgrimage to Cuba during the Advent of 2005. It was undertaken as a prayerful protest of the treatment of prisoners held incommunicado at the Guantánamo military base. Those w

"My name is Michael Juarez, and I am a junior at St. Raymond’s School for Boys,” said the slender young African American. He was standing on the stage of the vast ballroom of the Waldorf Astoria Hotel in mid-Manhattan. “I want to take this occasion,” he went on, “t

One of the Little Sisters of the Gospel who is a chaplain at a prison on Rikers Island in New York City asked me to say the Sunday Mass there on what turned out to be a bitterly cold afternoon. Part of me was glad to go; it would reconnect me with my own past years of chaplaincy work there. That exp

The Catholic Worker is just around the corner from my rectory, and ever since I moved to that neighborhood on the Lower East Side, I have felt blessed by the proximity. I should really say Catholic Workers, with an s, because there are actually two Worker communities a stone’s throw from each

"Here today, gone tomorrow.” That familiar saying can apply to many things, including buildings and rare architectural artifacts. In a city like New York, buildings are torn down and replaced in a matter of months, their original accompanying artifacts lost. With this destruction of older

"Our mission statement? When people ask us what it is, we just tell them Matthew 25—the section about welcoming the stranger, feeding the hungry and clothing the naked,” said Mark Zwick. I was speaking with Mark and his wife, Louise, about the Houston Catholic Worker, which this yea

Migration is a word heard with ever greater frequency, and I heard a lot about its many aspects—mostly painful ones—during a three-day conference last June at Fairfield University in Connecticut. Representatives from Fairfield and some 20 other Jesuit institutions, including several from