Last month students in my class on women and Catholicism spent an evening at a Catholic Worker House in South Bend Ind We prepared a meal shared it with the guests and listened to an after-dinner talk by Margaret Pfeil a staff member at the house and my colleague at Notre Dame Pfeil spoke abou

In an age habituated to sensationalism and big effects an austere and nuanced novel like Isobel English rsquo s Every Eyelike the work of her French predecessor Gustave Flaubertmay not appeal to everyone Even Madame Bovary has the soap opera appeal of adultery a theme by the way it shares with

Jason Robertsa contributor to The Village Voice among other publicationsbecame curious about a certain Englishman named James Holman after reading a brief chapter on him in a book about eccentric travelers Trying to learn more about the 19th-century blind man and his extensive travels Roberts was

In October 1967 hundreds of thousands of college students and ordinary citizens gathered in Washington D C to express their outrage about the Vietnam War The pranksters of that time including Abbie Hoffman and Jerry Rubin told the newsmen covering the march that they also hoped to levitate the

I carried a copy of Seamus Heaney rsquo s latest collection District and Circle with me to Europe this summer reading it on buses and trains and at outdoor restaurants in London This was the rainless summer when London hit 100 degrees Fahrenheit for the first time in recorded history happily

"It was truly amazing how Martin Luther King could sustain his hope for a beloved community at a time when nobody, black or white, seemed to believe in it or even care."