It was astonishing to see thousands thronging the Jai Alai arena in West Palm Beach a few years before the death of Rev. Patrick Peyton when I helped him with a Rosary Crusade, but I should have known that by his standard it was an unexceptional number, even smallish.

This is the time of year when I repeat Christina Rossetti's lines:

Father Richard John Neuhaus's work will be remembered and debated for decades.

Father Richard John Neuhaus died yesterday.

We are born to die. Not that death is the purpose of our being born, but we are born toward death, and in each of our lives the work of dying is already underway.

I am old enough to remember the last slump -- I was three in 1932 and lived in the Potteries in North Staffordshire, always a precarious area economically, and badly hit by slack trade.

Avery Cardinal Dulles was one of the greatest thinkers in the modern Roman Catholic church and perhaps its most distinguished representative in the United States.

An old man I know told me how he became a Roman Catholic, after an upbringing that would perhaps have better fitted him to become some sort of "humanist."

Among my most vivid memories of my father is being with him in Toronto, nearly 40 years ago, in the moments before he delivered a speech to a design convention.

Most of us know the story of the first Thanksgiving -- at least, we know the Pilgrim version. But how many of us know the Indian viewpoint?