Pope Francis, the first Jesuit pope and the first from the Americas, offered a challenge to his church. Could he deliver change and if so what would the impact be? Garry Wills, the Pulitzer Prize–winning historian, argues provocatively that, in fact, the history of the church throughout is a history of change. In this brilliant and incisive study, Wills describes the deep and serious chang…
The publication of The Characteristics of Jesuit Education in 1986 aroused a renewed interest in Jesuit education among teachers, administrators, students, parents and others around the world. It has given them a sense of identity and purpose. That document, translated into 13 languages, has been the focus for seminars, workshops, and study. Reactions have been overwhelmingly positive. In …
By studying the lives, careers and actions of individuals or groups in a given his-torical period, we can draw conclusions on the causes, courses and consequences of historical events, which will in turn help us to attain a clearer image of a past soci-ety, its customs and its perception of reality. Such an approach makes history more “human,” as well as more understandable and interesting.…
For some people life begins only after death; for others, life is a shifting journey toward a better place. As a kid, I dreamed of becoming a priest, and as a young adult, I lived for a few years in a consecrated community in Florence, Italy.1 Those years joyfully, and painfully, transformed my relation-ship with the Catholic Church. They helped me distinguish the in…
For most people most of the time, prayer is hard. It is especially difficultâ---not to mention unsatisfying---when people experience it as formal, dry, and repetitious. But what might happen if you discovered a simple prayer that changed all that? What if you discovered a prayer that changed you? In A Simple, Life-Changing Prayer, Jim Manney introduces Christians to a 500-year-old form of pray…