Our small caravan drove into Slavonski Brod, a war-torn Croatian city on the banks of the Sava River. It was July 1992, just after the first cessation of conflict in Croatia and at the beginning of the war in Bosnia. From the outskirts of the city, we could see heavy, black smoke rising from downtow

Tom Reese was almost always on the phone. As editor in chief of America, his job mainly entailed reviewing manuscripts, editing articles and proofreading galleys. In the midst of these duties, he also spent time, like any good editor, puzzling over ways to boost circulation and improve the magazine.

Even longtime readers of America may be unaware of the origins of this periodical. It was born in April 1909, during the worst days of the anti-Modernist crusade in the Catholic Church. Hysterical paranoia ran rampant, and Catholic intellectuals and writers were one after another accused of heresy b

François de La Rochefoucauld, a 16th-century French aristocrat, made a name for himself by writing tough-minded epigrams that he called maxims. In one of these philosophical wisecracks he noted: “Death and the sun are not to be looked at steadily.” All the same, there are some people wh

We get lots of stuff at America: press releases from Catholic colleges, books from Catholic publishers and, of course, letters from subscribers both pleased and angry at what we publish. Mostly the letters are friendly, charitable and pleasant. Only rarely are they vituperative. Still, even nasty le

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.