Ten or twelve years ago, here in Chicago, I was on an archdiocesan committee and was duly invited to an afternoon Christmas reception at the Cardinal’s mansion. There was a [...]
Last month, for Pentecost Sunday, one of the choices for a second reading was from Paul’s letter to the Galatians, and its high point, for me, was this sentence near [...]
Reaching By Patrick T. Reardon Each itch outside the sanctuary of Saint Mary of the Flower is rooted in the Florence street stones, each tiny twitch of unrest before [...]
In his eighties, Elmore Leonard apparently decided to write whatever he felt like writing. His last six books, published between 2005 and his death in 2013 at 87, were pretty [...]
Arrival of Godot By Patrick T. Reardon Comfort, yes, comfort, New Jerusalem. Your penance is at its end. Your guilt expiated. Gather, you, Mayor and City Council, in noon-sun Daley Plaza. [...]
Everyone, I suppose, has a sense of the what-if of history. What if Abraham Lincoln hadn’t gone to Ford’s Theater that night and had avoided assassination? What if I had [...]
A half a century ago, as a new political science professor at the University of Illinois at Chicago (UIC), Dick Simpson won election to the Chicago City Council for the [...]
In his poem “The Hourglass. The Pebble. The Throne of God,” Faisal Mohyuddin ponders “the lightless language of elegy.” His father is dead, and he is grieving. And he wonders [...]
The New York Game: Baseball and the Rise of a New City is Kevin Baker’s love letter to the city and the sport and the way they have intertwined for [...]
Some thoughts on re-reading Trevanian’s The Eiger Sanction nearly half a century after I first read it: The thriller The Eiger Sanction was published in 1972 and quickly became [...]
