During the last three years of her life, my grandmother spent much of her time in one small room of the house she had lived in since moving to the suburbs to be closer to her children and grandchildren. The room was about 6 feet by 6 feet, close quarters crammed with a couch, a television set and tw

Years ago the last editorial The Sunday New York Times ran each week was an essay on the changing seasons. As a boy I would page through the Week in Review section to read the weekly sketch of natural history. I identified with the writer’s fascination with the natural world, and read in the h

On this fifth anniversary of the attack on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, I have many memories of Sept. 11, 2001. Images flicker in the back of my mind when I am on the way to the airport or gazing up at a skyscraper on a blue-sky day. I expect the news stations this week will offer a nons

Inspirational stories are not what you would expect to find in the Money and Business section of the Sunday New York Times. Its articles are generally of the dollars and cents kind. But a few years ago, paging quickly through that Sunday’s business section, I began to notice a regular column c

Now I get it. Or at least part of it. The prospect of not raising children was not a big deal for me when I entered the Jesuits. It wasn’t a deal at all, really. And, over time, while I calculated (almost daily) the difficulty of going through life without one special person to stand by my sid

This is the season of parish closings, consolidations and reconfigurations. After watching the phenomenon at a distance for some years, it has finally struck home for me with a one-two punch. Late this spring the Archdiocese of New York announced the closure of my boyhood parish, St. Paul on Staten