"A tamale, please, and a cup of atole,” I said to the Mexican woman on East 116th Street, in the heart of Spanish Harlem. It was 7:45 a.m. on a weekday morning, and people were headed toward the subway to get to work. The woman was standing beneath a blue and white umbrella that shielded

A subway ride marks the beginning of my work days at America, and given the diversity of the nearly four million passengers who use New York City’s subway system each day, it offers an ever-varying picture of humanity. For commuters like me, the actual ride does not begin on the subway car its

"Getting out of prison, I had no job and no place to go, so I ended up in a shelter in Brooklyn,” said José Carrero. A recent graduate of the Ready, Willing & Able program of the Doe Fund, which helps homeless people become independent, José spoke these words at its annual graduatio

"We spent our first day in New York City in a soup kitchen at St. Francis Xavier Church in Lower Manhattan,” said Sabiha Ahmad. “I felt the sadness of the hundreds of hungry people gathered there as I buttered stale bagels and sorted used clothing,” she added. A graduate stude

Tompkins Square Park stands out as one of the larger parks of lower Manhattan: 10 whole acres—remarkable in a city cramped for space. On weekend afternoons, I sometimes walk over to admire the beauty of the park’s trees and marvel at the diversity of the people who gather there, well-off

Walk, walk, walk says my cardiologist. And I do, mostly just as a way of getting home. But I also enjoy it, though the Manhattan tempo is so accelerated that what might be called walking easily becomes run, run, run. This adrenaline-driven tempo has transformed me into one of the legions of jaywalke

"I am the only male member of my family on either side who hasn’t been in jail,” Mark Ford tells me. “During high school I sold and used drugs, I dropped out, and got kicked out twice.” We were speaking in a row house in Camden, N.J., that serves as office space for Hope

What paradise and what ashes are meant by the title Paradise in Ashes A Guatemalan Journey of Courage Terror and Hope The paradise refers to the small village of Santa Mar a Tzej In the late 1960 rsquo s it was virtually carved out of the rain forest in northern Guatemala by a group of poor

They came from all over, some 220 parents and children, and waited in line for up to three hours to enter the century-old red brick building in East Harlem. In this once Italian neighborhood, they were now mostly Hispanic immigrants from all over Central and Latin America and the Carribean. What the

This slender but powerful book describes how an upper-middle-class parish in Lima Peru was transformed in concert with the poor people in its midst largely through the efforts of its founding pastor The pastor who is also the author of Birth of a Church Joseph Nangle O F M recounts how this