Nearly 100,000 new books were published in the United States last year, and most of them were ignored by The New York Review of Books and the Sunday book sections of The New York Times and The Washington Post. Although these three are heavyweights in the book review business, they have space to exam

You may have noticed in a recent issue of America (2/25) a listing of retreat houses around the country, sponsored by both Jesuits and others. (The list will be kept up to date on America’s Web site.) Jesuits generally make an annual retreat of six to eight days, and while the specific purpose

Call them keepsakes or mementos, most of us hold on to various objects as reminders of people we have cared about over the years—often friends who have died. I prefer “memento” because of its clearer relationship to the word “memory.” Coming across them from time to tim

When I was growing up in suburban Philadelphia in the 1960’s and 1970’s, most of my friends were Jewish. I can say with confidence that I went to more seders than novenas, and attended more bat and bar mitzvahs than First Communion parties. At one point, I had been to so many bar mitzvah

Lack of affordable housing has affected all low-income people, but its effects have been especially harsh for the elderly and vulnerable. New York City provides a case in point. Many of the single-room occupancy hotels that dotted the Manhattan landscape through the 1960’s have disappeared, co

As the number of women religious declines, the public’s fascination with them only increases. One of the most highly praised books published in 2000, for example, was Mark Salzman’s novel Lying Awake, an exquisitely written tale about the religious experiences of a cloistered nun. Also p