St. Louis Jesuits in Concert Once More

The St. Louis Jesuits came together for a 25-year reunion concert at St. Joseph's Parish in Seattle this October. The lineup for the concert was the same as it was 25 years ago: Bob Dufford, SJ, John Foley, SJ, Tim Manion, Roc O'Connor, SJ, and Dan Schutte.

The St. Louis Jesuits, who have produced ten collections of music, penned many contemporary worship classics, including "Be Not Afraid" and "One Bread, One Body."

The five performed with a choir of 40 men and women for the benefit of the Ignatian Spirituality Center. Mary Hartrich, the center's director, called the concert "a true slice of heaven, graced in so many hoped-for, and also unexpected, ways. [It was] truly music of hope!"

Christ the King School Opens in Newark

Christ the King Prep School, the most recent in a string of new Cristo Rey schools, opened in September in Newark, New Jersey, with Jesuit Fr. Edward Glynn as president.

According to a New York Times article, Newark boasted 33 Catholic elementary or high schools in 1957, but that number has dwindled to 11, a decline steeper than that of the city's population over the same period. Christ the King operates in what was once Our Lady of Good Counsel High School.

Students at Cristo Rey schools participate in a work-study program through which they finance the majority of the cost of their education. For the 2007-08 school year, 4,234 students are enrolled in nineteen Cristo Rey-style schools across the nation.

National Geographic Photo Camp

Vy Linh Ky (with camera) and nineteen other New Orleans high schoolers were given one assignment by National Geographic magazine and Loyola University New Orleans during a photo camp this October: to take pictures of their communities.

Loyola photojournalism students volunteered to assist Vy and her fellow Vietnamese-American classmates in documenting their lives and surroundings. Their work was displayed at a church in New Orleans on the final day of the workshop, with another large exhibit in the city to follow.

This is the second year that the National Geographic photo camp has come to New Orleans in partnership with Loyola. Last year, National Geographic selected fifteen high school students, armed them with cameras and photography basics, and let them loose to document their homes after the storm. Last year's slideshow, "After the Disaster: A Look at New Orleans," is on the National Geographic's web site: www7.nationalgeographic.com/ngm/0608/feature1/multimedia.html

Shantytown on Campus

For the past seventeen years, students at Xavier University in Cincinnati have brought the plight of the world's homeless to the fore by erecting an impossible-to-miss shantytown on campus.

One week this October, they again built-and lived in-cardboard shanties they erected in the commons as a symbol of solidarity with those who have nowhere to live.

Each participating student represented a country in which homelessness is an issue. They were also given facts about homelessness to display on their "residences." Other students helped out by buying T-shirts and donating meals from their meal plans to the Greater Cincinnati Coalition for the Homeless.

Clean Water in Benin

Three professors and seventeen students from Gonzaga University in Spokane spent nearly two weeks in August in Benin, Africa, working to make drinking water safe. Civil engineering associate professor Brad Striebig led a group of education, engineering, nursing, English as a Second Language, and broadcasting students and professors to the country.

The group trained staff at the Songhai Center, a research and development organization, to make ceramic drinking water filters from clay and sawdust. The filters, designed by Gonzaga engineering students, use activated carbon manufactured from coconut shell waste to clean polluted drinking water.

"Despite the poverty, lack of water, and lack of health care, the people of Benin are delightful, and judging from our short experience, smile more easily than we do in the United States," Striebig says. -Peter Tormey

Back to Nature

Sixth graders Malik McCall, Samuel Romero-Herrera, and Antonio Banta were among 20 students from the Jesuits' St. Andrew Nativity School in Portland, Oregon, to attend the Oregon Museum of Science and Industry's science camp in Fossil, Oregon. Students learned about geological formations, Native American survival skills, and many aspects of their natural surroundings; these three combined their newly acquired knowledge of red iron soil and Native American history in the form of "warpaint."

For many of these inner-city youth, the "outdoor school" experience marked one of their first long-term encounters with nature.

Fr. Johm Dear, SJ

Poet Laureate

Former U.S. poet laureate Billy Collins made an appearance at Jesuit High School in Portland, Oregon, October, having a brown-bag lunch with faculty and staff and then speaking to a packed audience of students, parents, and faculty.

Greeted by a standing ovation and saluted by more standing applause at the conclusion of his reading, Collins injected morous anecdotes throughout his reading, drawing attention to his disdain for the yellow highlighters that students use. -Laura Garvey

Arrupe's Birthday

November 14 marked the 100th anniversary of the birth of Spaniard Fr. Pedro Arrupe, SJ, the Jesuit's superior general from 1965 to 1983 and the founder of the Jesuit Refugee Service.

Events commemorating the anniversary were held at Jesuit locales the world over. The Jesuit School of Theology at Berkeley hosted a series of Arrupe-related events through December, including lectures and films. Georgetown University premiered Pedro Arrupe: His Life and Legacy, a documentary the school commissioned that follows Arrupe's life from his childhood in Spain to his death in 1991, charting the influence his missionary work had on the world.

Card. Kozlowiecki, SJ

Card. Navarett, SJ

Fr. Richard Clifford, SJ