I came to Our Lady of Gethsemani Trappist Abbey one cloudy winter morning when I was twenty-six.

My father, freshly arrived from Maryland, sat in his hotel room placing batteries into a flashlight as diligently as a boot camp recruit loading a rifle under a drill sergeant's stare.

He was a soldier to the end. His threadbare army tunic hung on the wall, and his room was filled with religious icons, rosaries and holy pictures.

The garrulous Timothy Michael Dolan, preacher and raconteur extraordinaire, chooses his words carefully.

As I was saying to an old friend the other day, as we passed a crowded hamburger franchise: "Look at all the rugged individualists, lining up for their Big Macs! Look at all those freethinkers!"

After a crash, the Marines set an example.

We are not the first generation puzzled by what to do about the underclass. A hundred years ago and more, Manhattans tens of thousands of Irish seemed a lost community, mired in poverty and ignorance, destroying themselves through drink, idleness, violence, criminality, and illegitimacy.

This week the world lost a rare writer at the age of 43.

Literature offers us a rich panorama of marriages in which the woman is a shrew and the husband a victim.

What's more depressing than the economic slowdown.