The Society of Jesus and China have a long and complicated history, one that goes back to the very beginnings of the order. One of the co-founders of the Jesuits, the great St. Francis Xavier, died during his attempt to reach the Chinese mainland. Thirty years later, in 1582, Matteo Ricci, S.J., suc

Some say it all started with Bill Clinton’s feel-your-pain politics, others with Oprah’s daily pseudo-psychology. Still others say it began with MTV’s “The Real World,” the first in that ingeniously banal and now omnipresent genre called reality television.Whenever it s

Organizations as old as America rarely do anything completely unprecedented. For every “new” idea, there’s a pretty good chance that it’s been done before, in one way or another, during the course of 104 years of weekly publishing. This issue of America, however, is truly a f

Father John Courtney Murray’s work is lucid, imaginative, even daring.

In 1963 John LaFarge, S.J., witnessed the culmination of his efforts for racial reconciliation.

Wellfleet’s outer beach is just about an hour’s drive from my boyhood home on Cape Cod. The spot is well known for a steep, 50-foot sand cliff that rises behind it, topped by a gently sloping upland that affords a graceful vista of the Atlantic, exactly the sort of spot that prompted Hen