It isn’t often that you get the chance to help a new literary sensation. A few years ago, I got a friendly note from Uwem Akpan, a Nigerian Jesuit who was studying theology in Kenya. Uwem had written an article for America in November 1996 with the felicitous title “Nigerian Roman Cathol

Films can be a fine introduction to the saints. And sometimes the movie versions are as good as any biography for conveying the saint’s special charism.

When I left the World Trade Center in October 2001, after working there for several weeks alongside fellow Jesuits and other volunteers, I wondered what would become not only of the physical site but of the people we had met. One ironworker, who spent long days at Ground Zero cutting apart the steel

Now I get it. Or at least part of it. The prospect of not raising children was not a big deal for me when I entered the Jesuits. It wasn’t a deal at all, really. And, over time, while I calculated (almost daily) the difficulty of going through life without one special person to stand by my sid

Over the Memorial Day weekend I visited a friend who lives with his large family and who owns, improbably, a horse--a retired police horse, to be exact. As we ambled through the stables, my friend’s 13-year-old daughter said, "Do you like Taylor Hicks?" Somehow the look on her face t

The real-life group with the biggest complaint about the movie The Da Vinci Code is surely Opus Dei, the Catholic organization founded to promote lay spirituality. One of the film’s main plot devices centers on Silas, the albino Opus Dei monk who moonlights as an assassin. That Opus includes n

"Pas de vitesse," said our instructor in Italian-accented French. Then in English, "No rushing." I was one of several men being trained to work as a volunteer in the baths at Lourdes last month, and I was worried. This was my third visit to the French town of Lourdes, where the V

Saints and theologians, not to mention authors and poets, have long debated this thorny question: Why did Judas do it? To answer that we need to know something about the man himself.

I knew almost nothing about the town, except that it had some vague connection with Joan of Arc.

We have a policy at America of not running many obituaries. The practice saves the editors from agonizing over who gets one and who does not. Of course there are some obvious people who deserve obituaries or appreciations. Pope John Paul II and Mother Teresa, for example. Over the last year the theo