It is rare that the author of one extraordinary book should follow it a decade later with another of almost equal power And yet this is what Helen Prejean C S J has done in The Death of Innocents An Eyewitness Account of Wrongful Executions Already an acclaimed author for her Dead Man Walking

Deafness as a gift--that is how Paul Fletcher, a profoundly deaf British Jesuit, sees his situation in a world of mostly hearing people. I met Paul when he visited my Jesuit community in Manhattan before returning to England after completing his studies at Weston School of Theology in Massachusetts.

Delivering a hot meal to an elderly woman in a public housing project is how my Saturday afternoons begin. Her meal and hundreds of others are prepared in the basement of a Manhattan church. Most are eaten right there, but enough are set aside to accommodate shut-ins as part of a program informally

Joel Magallán, S.J., is the founder and executive director of the Asociación Tepeyac in New York City. (Tepeyac is the name of the hill near Mexico City where the Virgin Mary is believed to have appeared to Blessed Juan Diego in 1531.) A network of 40 community and parish-based organizations, the

Martha Stewart expressed disappointment upon learning that she would be serving her sentence at the federal women’s prison in Alderson, W.Va. Its remoteness, she said through a lawyer prior to her arrival, would make it difficult for friends, family members and attorneys to visit. But when the

You are a 26-year-old mother of four and suddenly you find yourself behind bars mdash not for a few months but for a long 16 years as a first-time drug offender During those years your children grow up and the youngest angrily blurts out when you finally do return and attempt to resume your ro

For those interested in the world of incarceration in the United States Criminal Justice Retribution vs Restoration serves as an excellent overview Punishment now predominates and we are reaping the whirlwind in the form of the highest incarceration rate in the world Over two million human bei

Smoking began for me at 16. My friends started then too, and because it was forbidden on school grounds, the incentive of rule-breaking made it all the more attractive. After starting with Pall Malls and then Marlboros, I went on to Salems in graduate school, where any nonsmoking student was viewed

Imagine this Your teenage son has been tortured to death under the regime of a Latin American military dictator Imagine too that instead of quietly succumbing to your grief you publicly denounce the murder and speak out against the regime mdash that of the Paraguayan dictator Alfredo Stroessner

Central Park lies just a few blocks from America House, and no matter what the season, I sometimes walk there to join other office workers for lunch, on the grass in warm weather or on a bench. Preferring to be on the move, though, I continue on, sandwich in hand, to the center of the park’s 8