I was startled. One of my Jesuit confreres had just introduced me to a fellow graduate student, not by name but as “our superior.” We were classmates; we lived in a small community, but somehow I had turned from Drew into “Father Superior.” I was no longer an individual. I wa

Taking a subway from one island to another—that is something you can do only in a place like Manhattan. Manhattan itself is an island, and I was going from there to Roosevelt Island just across the East River. Coming up the long escalators from subterranean depths, I was stunned to see the riv

St. Paul would not have been surprised by the clash of opinions aroused by Mel Gibson’s movie “The Passion of the Christ.” At the beginning of his First Letter to the Corinthians, Paul alluded to the controversy he himself encountered when he proclaimed “Christ nailed to the

Pilgrimage has rarely been easy. Storms and shipwrecks, robbery and kidnaping, wars and illness were endured, not to mention the self-imposed disciplines: walking barefoot, fasting, begging for hospitality or passage. In his day, after enduring three and a half months of storm-tossed travel while re

Institutional cultures are notoriously hard to change, whether the institution is a corporation, a university or a not-for-profit organization. Those who are comfortable with unquestioned assumptions and accustomed ways of doing things are not likely to recognize the need for change, even when the i

As letters to America go, this one was nothing special. A Catholic physician had written to argue for a married Catholic clergy, listing a number of familiar arguments, including the superior ability of married Protestant ministers to relate to their congregations, the equivocal witness of early chu