On September 11, 2001, when a terrorist attack brought down the twin towers of the World Trade Center and took the lives of more than 3000 innocents, St. Joseph’s Chapel, just across the street, in Battery Park City, was spared….
You probably recall hearing about the 24-year-old North Korean border guard who put down his weapon and sprinted across No Man’s Land in a desperate attempt to reach freedom and security in South Korea. His former comrades opened fire on…
Mecca and Medina, Islam’s two holiest cities, are both located in Saudi Arabia. As guardians of these sacred sites, the Saudi royal family has decreed that no non-Muslim house of worship may be erected in the kingdom. Of course, not…
Nearly a century after the cornerstone was laid in 1920, the National Shrine of the Immaculate Conception in Washington, D.C., is complete. On December 8, the Solemnity of the Immaculate Conception, the final portion of the church — the largest…
Remember video stores? They tended to be hole-in-the-wall shops stacked floor to ceiling with VHS cassettes of every movie you didn’t want to rent, but you couldn’t rent the one you wanted because it had been rented already. In terms…
Somewhere, there may be an alma mater with stirring music and world-class lyrics. If it exists, I’ve never heard it. My college’s alma mater begins: Beneath New Jersey’s skies of blue, In Montclair’s mountain town, There stands our college, tried…
I tried to come up with a title for this story that would be a clever spin on the “Why did the chicken cross the road?” gag, but I’ve got nothing. New infrastructure that eases congestion of vehicular traffic is…
Tom Lehrer is the greatest comic songwriter of the last century. Okay. Maybe that’s too much. But he’s definitely the most hilarious of the last 89 years. (His 89th birthday is upon us.) At age ten, I was introduced to…
It’s gotta sting. The Vatican has just whupped Archbishop Gustavo Garcia-Siller of San Antonio, upholding the right of the parish of Our Lady of the Atonement to place itself under the authority of a more congenial bishop. What should have…
More than a decade ago, I was working with a publisher who was experiencing a crisis of conscience. Printing books in the U.S. had gotten expensive. But in Asia, printers were offering quality work at significant savings. The publisher told…