Recently on a freezing cold morning, I found myself sitting in the corner of a school cafeteria with a warm, delicious cup of coffee in my hands. Seated near a few hundred students, I was chatting with a veteran Lasallian teacher. After we exchanged insights into modern teenage society, he quickly got on to another topic [...]
Illustration by Al Cassidy 2014 Derived from medieval Europe, “blue bloods” distinguishes the upper class—whose veins appeared blue through their untanned skin—from the working class of the time. The term eventually came to refer generally to a those who inherited a bloodline. Len Cariou plays Henry Regan, the family patriarch and former New York police [...]
On the first day of spring this year I was in place on the front lawn of Christian Brothers Center in Narragansett to welcome a magnificent sunrise. In the gentle breeze the trees were almost as flexible as I was in several yoga poses. As the sky lightened up a bit my attention was diverted [...]
Early in the spring of 1978 Bill Fecteau and I met on a street corner in the South Bronx to evaluate our efforts to refound a Lasallian community in that neighborhood. Our long standing community at St. Augustine School had closed a year earlier, and a new mission was developing around adults who wanted to begin [...]
Recently, while sitting in 22B on a United Airlines flight, I had a great awakening when the president of United came on the screen in front of me with a commercial. He wore a shirt with the United emblem on the chest. Behind him stood a plane with the usual markings, but not once in his [...]
A few months ago the Nobel Prize in Physics confirmed the Higgs Boson, the most basic building block of the universe that forms the world we know today. Once upon a time these particles slowed down, like a marble rolling through molasses, in an invisible field that pervaded the universe. The resulting clumps formed atoms [...]
Not long ago a chapel full of Lasallians gathered at Manhattan College to celebrate and send: celebrate a new Lasallian mission in Jamaica and send Rich Ward, Brother Gus Nicoletti and Brother Jim Wallace to work at St. Vincent Strambi Catholic High School in Bull Savannah. It was August 15, 2013, the feast of Mary [...]
“Community for Mission” defines the Lasallian charism across the world today as it has since the beginning. For most of Lasallian history, its family members have been De La Salle Christian Brothers who have lived and worked together in schools and institutions. We call them residential communities. This Spirit-filled insight of De La Salle grew [...]
“We are the Church, and we are to build that kingdom in our society. I have been chosen by God, just like He did with De La Salle to bring the salvation of God to young people and all persons that cross my path, which is a great challenge.” Joan Eoe, a Papua New Guinean [...]
“Ed, there are electrical problems at Ocean Rest and we moved the retreat to Pennsylvania. Can you pick up the retreat director at Newark airport and drive her out to Malvern?” “No problem, Dennis!” Close friends know this response from me is anything but that. It is what I say when three people want to [...]