As my London-bound train clicked over the rails that fall afternoon in 1989, my eyes were transfixed by a newspaper photo of an elderly Japanese. This was the man I had searched for the one who had brutally tortured me years before.
Football is Americas game, and racism is Americas aboriginal sin. That the former might offer a measure of redemption for the latter is just too good to be true.
It was a dash across the country from grandeur to simplicity, from the celebrated to the unremarked, from the soaring cathedral of Toronto to the parish church where I grew up.
On the day after New Years, as most of the world now knows, Wesley Autrey, a construction worker and a Navy veteran, was waiting for the train with his two daughters at the 137th Street Station in New York.
For 50 difficult years, from Hitlers invasion in 1939 until the communist crack-up in 1989, Polish Catholicism fought tenaciously and successfully for its independence, and Polands, by emphasizing the liberating power of the truth. That brilliant accomplishment must not be compromised now by a stubborn reluctance to face the full truth of those five decades.
The torch of faith is being handed on to a new generation, and they are finding their own ways of holding it high.
Elizabeth Fox-Genovese was a scholar as notable for her bravery as for her brilliance.
Secular Christmas poems and stories, like The Night Before Christmas or The Gift of the Magi, are remarkable in the way they enchant young people from generation to generation. But there is one Christmas story that never grows stale, that is fresh to all ages and places, to young and old, to men and women. It goes like this.
You almost didnt notice her in class. She was small for 7, and quiet; she didnt cause trouble the way the boys did. Her features were plain, and her blond hair was cropped short in a raggedy, home-cut style vaguely reminiscent of the Little Prince. No matter what the time of year, she always wore the same assortment of faded cotton dresses, the same cheap sneakers. Her name was Carla.
As I was unfamiliar with the Spanish convention of naming boys for the Savior, it startled me upon arriving in my new parish to read on the bulletin board: If there is no usher at the 7:30 Mass, Jesus will take up the collection.
