James Fisher, a professor of history at Fordham, has just published On the Irish Waterfront, the story of the New York/New Jersey waterfront, which was run by the Irish mob for the first half of the 20th century.   A...

Religious educators with an Ignatian bent take note. A young Jesuit named Anthony Borrow has been using the Spiritual Exercises in his classes at Dallas Jesuit College Prep school. He has developed 31 exercises for classroom sessions that include periods...

IgnatianSpirituality.com is starting a newsletter about, you guessed it, Ignatian spirituality. It will be full of ideas, resources, links, and news. It's called E-Magis. The first issue will be in your e-mailbox by the end of the...

One of my favorite movies is The Mission, a film inspired by the Jesuit missions in South America in the eighteenth century. One of the many memorable features of this movie is the splendid soundtrack by the Italian composer...

A couple of interesting new bloggers have set up shop lately. Convert Webster Bull writes the blog "Why I am a Catholic." The title of each post begins with the word "Because" (Because Gerard Manley Hopkins Was a Catholic, Because...

This week classes start at 22 US high schools that are part of the Cristo Rey network, an innovative and highly successful model for urban education.  Cristo Rey schools serve the urban poor.  99 percent of their graduates go...

This week's Ignatian song is the hard rock classic "Livin' on a Prayer" by Bon Jovi. It's about a working class couple "livin' on a prayer" as they struggle to make ends meet. Lyrics here. But it's this...

People who work as administrators grumble about it all the time.  "Another meeting." "Another performance review." "Another crisis."   Yet administration is on St. Paul's list of spiritual gifts in 1 Corinthians 12.  Ann Garrido, an academic administrator in St....

Here is a fascinating conversion story by a blogger named Webster Bull.  The decisive moment in his spiritual journey came when he wandered into Borders and picked up a copy of My Life with the Saints by Jim Martin,...

Prayer using the imagination is a pillar of the Ignatian spiritual tradition. In its most common form, you take a passage from scripture, usually one of the gospels, and immerse yourself in it imaginatively using all the senses. You feel the heat...