Lent? Wasn’t it just Christmas? Catholics can be forgiven for sometimes scratching their heads over the liturgical calendar. While the liturgical year is designed to help Christians follow the life, death and resurrection of Jesus by meditating on the sequence of Gospel readings, sometimes it

The Golden Globes used to be the most relaxed of the awards ceremonies. For many years the lesser-known stepcousin of the Oscars, the Emmys and the Tonys, the ceremony wore its raffish air with the pride of a starlet wearing a couture gown. A recent issue of Entertainment Weekly featured Helen Mirre

In November 1949 the year after the publication of his bestselling autobiography The Seven Storey Mountain Thomas Merton dropped a note to his old college friend Robert Lax about the latest news from the Abbey of Gethsemani quot People keep writing from India we should start a monastery there

"July," said my sister, Carolyn. And I was amazed. "This year we got our first Christmas catalogue in the mail in July," she said. It was from Lands’ End. Even though Carolyn was driving the car and I was sitting next to her, I knew without looking that we were rolling our

It isn’t often that you get the chance to help a new literary sensation. A few years ago, I got a friendly note from Uwem Akpan, a Nigerian Jesuit who was studying theology in Kenya. Uwem had written an article for America in November 1996 with the felicitous title “Nigerian Roman Cathol

Films can be a fine introduction to the saints. And sometimes the movie versions are as good as any biography for conveying the saint’s special charism.

When I left the World Trade Center in October 2001, after working there for several weeks alongside fellow Jesuits and other volunteers, I wondered what would become not only of the physical site but of the people we had met. One ironworker, who spent long days at Ground Zero cutting apart the steel

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

Over the Memorial Day weekend I visited a friend who lives with his large family and who owns, improbably, a horse--a retired police horse, to be exact. As we ambled through the stables, my friend’s 13-year-old daughter said, "Do you like Taylor Hicks?" Somehow the look on her face t

The real-life group with the biggest complaint about the movie The Da Vinci Code is surely Opus Dei, the Catholic organization founded to promote lay spirituality. One of the film’s main plot devices centers on Silas, the albino Opus Dei monk who moonlights as an assassin. That Opus includes n