America Magazine - Current Issue

Of Many Things

The creation of dictionaries and grammars of languages in the Americas, Asia and India is one of the accomplishments for which Jesuit missionaries of past centuries were known. In order to bring the Gospel to the people, the missionaries first learned the local language. Then, having put it into written form, they could teach it to other missionaries.

Several months ago, at a conference on local churches around the world at the Jesuit School of Theology in Berkeley, Calif., I came across a modern variation of this traditional Jesuit enterprise. Simon Nsielanga, a young Jesuit Congolese student there, is now teaching others his own language, Nzadi. This obscure language is spoken i

A Simple Remedy

If the U.S. political leadership is serious about confronting the viral doomsday of H1N1, then part of any comprehensive response must be to improve the nation’s weak standards for worker sick leave. The United States lags far behind other industrialized nations in the time off allowed workers to recover from illnesses.

After decades of hard-won improvements in labor standards, it comes as a shock to learn that more than 57 million U.S. workers are entitled to no annual sick days at all. A high percentage of those workers are concentrated in service industry jobs, like restaurant and cafeteria work or child day care, where regular contact with the wider public is part of the

Current Comment

Can’t Buy Me Love

Election Day 2009 provided a fix for political junkies still in withdrawal from the electoral highs of 2008. Among the most intriguing story lines of the day was the loss, and near loss, of two wealthy businessmen turned public servants. Michael R. Bloomberg spent more of his own money on his campaign for mayor of New York than any other municipal candidate in history, yet won by only five percentage points. (Late polls had projected him ahead by 18 points.) Governor Jon Corzine of New Jersey outspent his Republican opponent

A Survivor�s Story

Forgiving the men who killed my parents and brother was a process, a journey into deeper and deeper prayer,” Immaculée Ilibagiza told me as we sat in the lobby of a Manhattan hotel last June. Intense prayer, she said, had helped her survive the three months that she and several other women lay crammed into a small bathroom in the home of a Protestant pastor near her home in the western province of Kibuye, on Lake Kivu. Pastor Murinzi, a Hutu, did not share in the ethnic hatred between Hutu and Tutsi that burst forth in Rwanda in 1994. He took in the eight Tutsi women who begged fo

A Visitor�s Guide

How do you ascertain the religious motivation, practice and well-being of 60,000 women religious and their congregations across the United States? It is a daunting challenge, but we are about to find out.

By now most readers of America are aware that the Vatican has initiated an apostolic visitation of American women religious. Between April and July, Mother Mary Clare Millea, A.S.C.J., the designated visitator, interviewed either in person, over the phone or through correspondence, 244 superiors general of the various congregations. This fall, each congregation received a lengthy quest

Monastic Analysis

At 2:15 every morning in the dark, silent fields of western New York, small reading lights come on one by one in the chapel stalls of the Abbey of the Genesee. As they have done for most of their adult lives, some 30 Trappist monks are making ready to pray for a world that is still asleep. But this year, something is different. This year that sleep is fitful.

“The bulletin board is filling up with prayer requests for employment,” says Brother Paul, who has lived within the monastic enclosure for 23 of his 50 years. “You read them, and you can tell that people are fearful that they’ll lose their jobs. Some have alre

After the Storm

A late-January ice storm that caused much destruction in the Midwest began with stunning beauty, as the landscape was transformed into a lovely glass statue of itself, glinting in the dying light of evening. In the darkness, however, the glass began to shatter. I lay awake, hearing the eerie and sickening sound of crack upon crash in the woodlot of our farm.

Soon after the storm, I hiked through the woods, anxious about what I might find. The damage was appalling. When I bought the property a decade ago, the woodlot had just been cut over, heavily and carelessly, but by now it was beginning to recover. The poplars, black walnuts, hickories, maples and oaks that were spared by the

Slandering the President

On Oct. 29 Glenn Beck ended his program on Fox TV with the words of Thomas Jefferson: “All tyranny needs to gain a foothold is for people of good conscience to remain silent.” Beck himself certainly has not been silent. In lectures, best-selling books, a radio program and his television show, he has warned America of the coming tyranny under a conspiratorial president. Armed with videos and quotations ranging from the mindless and amoral behavior of some members of Acorn to reckless statements made by associates and appointees of President Obama, Beck connects dots to draw a web of radicals who are out to destroy America as

How It Began

While many of us have come to recognize that some New Testament books and early Christian writings treat Jews and Judaism harshly, few of us advert to their denunciations of pagan religions as idolatrous and even demonic. Yet it is also clear that the first Christians borrowed many of their key theological terms and concepts not only from the Jewish tradition but also from the Greco-Roman culture surrounding them. This volume, which is part of the Anchor Yale (formerly Doubleday) Bible Reference Library, contends that new perspectives and new knowledge (archaeological and textual) combined

Katrina Land

The Gulf Coast crosses the South from Florida to Texas, five states, and some may think of the coast as a sixth, defined as it is by ports of call, oil rigs, casinos and an ethnically diverse population. Fishing vessels ply the waterways; so do ’gators and seagulls. Neither the men nor the women who work and live there are easily shocked. Life on a waterfront wises people up. References to prison occur with some regularity.

Skip Horack’s debut book, a collection of 16 short stories set on or around the Gulf Coast, brings us close to these hard-knuckled but fair-minded men and women. As the acc

The God of Morning

In the dawn
I dreamt of God.
He was riding a bicycle,
His strong hands on the handlebars fiercely,
The rest of him floating, billowing out
like a great sail or a ghost.
I thought he did not know where
He was headed,
Or much cared for that matter,
But one thing was certain:
He was never letting go.
He took no note of me,
Hurtling on,
Singular, determined,
Like a frightened parent
Summoned in the night
To unknown heartache.
In the morning
I awoke,
And fell in love with him
All over again.

Promises Fulfilled

How do people who fall in love sustain their hopeful expectation of one another throughout their lives? Some relationships begin to crumble after the infatuation wears off, the delight in mutual commitment fades and routine life settles in. Others weather the passage of time with moments of renewed celebration of promises made and kept and of crises faced together, strengthening the lifelong bond. Such experiences in human relationships reveal something of how God interacts with us.

As Advent begins, people in the Northern Hemisphere may be inclined to snuggle into the shortened, dark days of approaching winter to calmly contemplate the coming of Christ. But the readings put us in

Letters

Hard to Imagine

Thank you for printing the wonderful article “Our Brothers, the Jews,” by Dorothy Day (11/9). It is an illuminating time capsule of prior years. I cannot imagine the United States as it was described. It was warming to hear the words mystical body, words that are not mentioned much any more.

Richard Benitez

San Francisco, Calif.

Real Catholicism

Unfortunately, many things have not changed since Dorothy Day’s time—but the scapegoat has. Now it is the Hispanics from south of the border. Americans, including a large number of C