Modern folklore says that the Inuits (Eskimos) have more than fifty words for snow and ice, but, apparently, the fact is there are only about half that many. In his [...]

There’s a tendency to think of great painters such as Michelangelo and Rembrandt as geniuses who worked alone.  Of course, they’d have a lot of support staff, if only to [...]

If you are grieving or have grieved in the past, you know that people want to help, but, often, they just don’t know how. In Grieving: A Spiritual Process for [...]

Edna Ferber’s The Girls, a novel about three independent-minded South Side women yearning for vibrant lives, was originally published more than a century ago, but it’s written with such verve [...]

If you’re at all familiar with DePaul University’s Lincoln Park campus, you’ve almost certainly been impressed by the nine-foot-tall statue of Msgr. Jack Egan at the eastern entrance of the [...]

In the middle of his account of the Battle of the Plains of Abraham — one of the most consequential events in world history — D. Peter MacLeod writes about [...]

I realized recently that I don’t know how to think about the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles.  What I mean is that the Getty, founded in 1974 by [...]

It is important that there is a book such as Art T. Burton’sBlack Gun, Silver Star: The Life and Legend of Frontier Marshall Bass Reeves to ensure that the memory [...]

Normally, I’d just as soon know little or nothing about the author of a novel I’m reading.  Later, after the book’s done, yeah, maybe I’ll try to find out some [...]

Back on October 6, 1990, I was in a crowd of hundreds of people at a dinner in a downtown Chicago hotel for an event honoring the 100th anniversary of [...]