François de La Rochefoucauld, a 16th-century French aristocrat, made a name for himself by writing tough-minded epigrams that he called maxims. In one of these philosophical wisecracks he noted: “Death and the sun are not to be looked at steadily.” All the same, there are some people wh

For Christians Easter is a reminder that faith can be shaken without being toppled.

St. Paul would not have been surprised by the clash of opinions aroused by Mel Gibson’s movie “The Passion of the Christ.” At the beginning of his First Letter to the Corinthians, Paul alluded to the controversy he himself encountered when he proclaimed “Christ nailed to the

One afternoon in early February, a sad-eyed man in a faded parka was standing on a corner in Midtown Manhattan. He was timidly trying to distribute cards for a nearby sandwich-and-salad shop, but the crowd brushed past him. Not far away, two young women were more successful. Smiling and twittering,

On the afternoon of May 22, 1856, Congressman Preston S. Brooks of South Carolina barged into the Senate chamber and used his walking stick to beat into insensibility Senator Charles Sumner of Massachusetts. Two days earlier, Sumner had given a fiery antislavery speech that Brooks claimed had libele

Theodore Roosevelt High School stretches for nearly a block along Fordham Road in New York City’s borough of the Bronx. It was built in the late 1920’s for a student population of 2,500 to 3,000. Most of these were the children of Italian-American, Irish-American and Jewish families. &nb

When 2002 began, there were in the United States approximately 86,000 public schools, elementary and secondary. But from sea to shining sea, according to a count made by the Brighter Choice Foundation in Albany, N.Y., only 11 of these schools qualified for the rather clunky label “single-sex p

Jimmy Carter, who learned Spanish in the Navy, found a special use for that skill in 1969, when he was a state senator in Georgia. In that year he worked for some days as a Southern Baptist lay evangelist in a Spanish-speaking neighborhood of Springfield, Mass.In a speech at the University of Havana

The saints in glory, whether they have been formally canonized or not, are immune to irritation. Were that not the case, those canonized saints who were married men might have been chagrined to find their existence denied in a letter to the editor in the May 6 issue of The New Yorker.Thomas A. DiMag

Nearly 100,000 new books were published in the United States last year, and most of them were ignored by The New York Review of Books and the Sunday book sections of The New York Times and The Washington Post. Although these three are heavyweights in the book review business, they have space to exam