In late August a group of theologians gathered at America House in New York to celebrate a colleague and friend who was retiring from his position as vice president and senior editor at Continuum International publishers. He edited some of us first in the early 1980s, others in the 90s, and several

We thought we knew him, with that searching unsettling gaze of his, the man with a peasant face who became the master of light and shadow, saturated color and probing psychology. The guises in which he presented himself varied greatly: here as a soldier, there as a prince, now as a beggar or as a ki

The first stage picture of "Voyage," the initial play in Tom Stoppard’s thrilling trilogy The Coast of Utopia, must rank among the most memorable ever seen on a stage. Out of the darkness, in midair, a man appears sitting in a slowly revolving chair, absorbed in thought as the chair

The horrors of the bloody century past—from the Great War through the Holocaust and Hiroshima to the genocide in Rwanda—all but defy human imagination. Some artists, though, have summoned skill enough to warn us of the sorrows humanity can inflict upon itself. Their imagery bears ponderi

Some artists whom you think you know well, like some old friends, can surprise you entirely. Perhaps experience has prepared you to share their vision. Or the times have taken a turn that gives the art new urgency. New scholarship uncovers influences and contexts. Radiography and restoration can tel

On Oct. 6, 2005, a memorial Mass was celebrated at Holy Trinity Church in Washington, D.C., for Monika Hellwig, the distinguished theologian and educator who a month earlier had become a Senior Fellow at the Woodstock Theological Center. It was the very day and time when she had planned to lead a di

There was a time in the American theater when ordinary people could collect quarters in a cup and, after some weeks, buy a ticket for a Broadway show. It was the decade after World War II, the cataclysm that put horror and hope on a seemingly equal footing. But American idealism had triumphed, or so

I vividly remember first seeing Karl Rahner in 1964 at Georgetown University’s 175th anniversary celebration. A major symposium had been prepared, during which he delivered—that is to say, William Dych, S.J., read for him—the great lecture on the theology of freedom. Awestruck, I s

You can see a wonderful golden tabernacle and monstrance by Egino Weinert in the Gaukirche of Paderborn in Germany. You can pray his Stations of the Cross in the parish church of Strassen in Luxembourg or at St. Vincent de Paul’s in Huntington Beach, Calif. You can admire his decorations at a

Some images are so powerful that, if we take time for them, they can alter our lives. The spirit hovering over the waters, the Lord who is our shepherd, the mountain on which every tear will be wiped away are such images, given us by the Jewish people and still nourishing us centuries later. Others