Founded by Jesuit Father Greg Boyle during the height of the L.A.’s gang wars 23 years ago, Homeboy Industries’ businesses, which include a silk-screen shop, a bakery and an 86-seat restaurant, currently provide job opportunities and training for over 400 ex-gang members.

This summer, when Los Angeles’ City Hall  was looking for a vendor to move into an unoccupied cafe space on the second floor, a new venture, Homeboy Diner, was born.

Ignatian News Network was there for the opening of the cafe with Fr. Boyle and the diner’s new staff.

The Urban Plunge is a credit course offered to any student at Notre Dame by the Social Concerns Department. Its purpose is to demonstrate the problems of homelessness and poverty in the inner city. The core of the program is a 48 hour “urban plunge” during the Christmas vacation at a city near the student’s home. This plunge is preceded by several class periods and readings, and followed by another class period and a final paper.

Fr. Kammer’s lecture to the students, titled “Building Justice in the Cities,” addressed breaking the cycle of urban poverty. Kammer is currently is the executive director of the Jesuit Social Research Institute and has worked as the president of Catholic Charities USA.

“Making the invisible visible is the first step to compassion,” Kammer said. “Standing with the poor is a touchstone that gives us a wisdom that comes from the poor themselves and leads us to make judgments in favor of the poor.”

Kammer said taking a stand with the poor challenges our society’s dominant views.

“Standing with those who are poor introduces us to a new way of seeing the world around us,” he said. “This insistence on personal contact runs against our culture’s proclivity to see the poor as invisible or faceless.”

Kammer said once people make an initial commitment to stand with the poor, they might change the way they live their own lives.

“One of the first reactions that people have is to adopt a simpler lifestyle,” he said. “This choice is a stance appropriate to students.  Individuals who stand with the poor also stand with them in their career choices whether by choosing to teach in inner-city schools instead of the suburbs or doing social work in place of commercial law.

You can read more about Kammer’s lecture and the Urban Plunge program via this article in the university’s Observer newspaper. Kammer’s lecture can be found on video at Notre Dame’s Center for Social Concern’s website here.

Ignatian News Network (INN) will tell the stories that inspire, inform and spread the word about the people in and around Jesuit ministries and institutions. These short videos, many featuring biographical profiles of Jesuits, will give a distinctive Ignatian lens to news and happenings across the U.S.

National Jesuit News will be featuring upcoming INN videos right here. You can also subscribe to the INN YouTube channel and check out this promo piece below:

The Kino Border Initiative (KBI) was founded in January 2009 as a binational effort to help support and provide assistance to deported migrants. Since its founding, KBI has served thousands of migrants by providing food, shelter, first aid and pastoral support.

Fr. Carroll recently spoke with National Jesuit News by phone from Nogales to discuss the work of KBI and about his own background as a Jesuit. You can listen to our podcast with Carroll via the player below.

Jesuit Father Rodney Kissinger has been a Jesuit since entering the Society of Jesus in 1942. At 96 years old, Fr. Kissinger still finds the time to help those who are interesting in experiencing the  Spiritual Exercises of St. Ignatius.

In February 2004, Kissinger wrote an article for the print version of National Jesuit News explaining his idea of conducting retreats using the power of the internet by having the retreatant and the spiritual director conduct the retreat all via email communications. Since that time, Kissinger has had much success in conducting these very kinds of retreats and now shares with us his experiences and those who have come to him for spiritual guidance and direction. You can find out more about Kissinger’s approach to the Spiritual Exercises by visiting his site at www.frksj.org.

Most of my priestly life of over 60 years has been spent giving the Spiritual Exercises. I have given the preached retreat, the guided retreat, the personally directed retreat, the 19^th annotation retreat and now I am giving, with great joy and much success, a type of retreat of which Ignatius could never have even dreamed. And a type of retreat that I am sure the author of the “tantum quantum” and the “magis” would have joyfully embraced. It is the email retreat.

Email is the ideal vehicle for doing the 19^th annotation because it is least intrusive into the daily life of the retreatant. My edition of the email retreat runs for 14 weeks. I suggest that the retreatant do at least half an hour of prayer daily and make the exam of consciousness each night. This time frame, however, is flexible and adaptable to the retreatant. One may want to spend another week on one of the meditations; others may have to interrupt the retreat for a medical or business emergency. No problem, I just withhold the next meditation until they are ready. How foolish to try to corral the Holy Spirit into a certain time frame.

Most of the requests for these retreats I have received have come from the laity. We should not be surprised at all of this since Ignatius was a layman when he wrote the Spiritual Exercises and it was as a layman that he gave the first retreat to laymen. He also did a lot of counseling by letter. In fact, it is said that he was one of the most prolific letter writers of his day. How enthusiastically would he have embraced email!

What sparked the idea of an email retreat was the delight and gratitude of friends when I would attach a homily to one of my email letters to them. It was not exactly a leap of faith then to go from a homily to the 19^th annotation. Last June, I gave my first email retreat to two of these friends who volunteered to be guinea pigs. Since that time I have given 40 of these email retreats. The retreatants include a friend in Fulda, Germany, a biology professor at Lakeland College in Sheboygan, Wisconsin, an appellate judge in Bradenton, Florida, a married couple in Stafford, Virginia, a candidate for the Society in College Station, Texas, a director of adult spirituality at St. Ignatius High School in San Francisco, a Missouri Synod Lutheran in Adair, Iowa, the Dean of Humanities in Our Lady of the Holy Cross College in New Orleans, a hair stylist in Eugene, Oregon, a sophomore at LSU in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, a Permanent Deacon in the Archdiocese of Kansas City, a senior recruiting consultant in Plano, Texas, and a disciple of the Legionnaires of Christ in Tampa, Florida.

Since most of my retreatants are first-timers I give a lot of material in my presentations.  All of the key meditations of the Exercises are given so that they see the big picture and get the thrust and dynamic of the whole of the Exercises. A thrust and dynamic which unfortunately, is often missed today when what are given are spiritual exercises but not the Spiritual Exercises of St. Ignatius. I suggest that they download or print out the presentations and keep them all together so that they can see the psychological and spiritual progression from the Principle and Foundation to the Contemplation to Obtain Love.

During the rest of the year and for years to come they can go over them again and again, and concentrate on specific meditations which are relevant for them at that time.  Repetition is important because these truths are so rich and so deep that they cannot be absorbed at one time. And whatever is received is received according to the disposition of the recipient which is constantly changing. What is repeated is not the whole meditation. When you find the needle in the haystack you do not go through the haystack again. What is repeated is the part that moved us either with consolation or desolation. Therefore, it is important to write down these movements, in a journal if possible.

The retreat takes place on two levels: what happens here and what happens between the retreatant and God. The important level is the relationship with God. Personal relationships demand knowledge and love. We cannot love what we do not know but it is the knowledge that comes from love which is the wisdom of the mystics.

The email retreat, of course, loses the personal contact which is found in the other types of retreat. But this is not an unmixed evil. It stimulates more initiative, responsibility and independence on the part of the retreatant. St. Ignatius in the annotations exhorts the director to allow “the Creator to deal directly with the creature, and the creature directly with his Creator and Lord.”

It is also true that sometimes in a personally directed retreat a conflict of personalities puts an added onus on the retreatant. It is a lot easier to express embarrassing questions in writing than in person. And the necessity of conceptualizing and expressing in writing our thoughts has a way of clarifying difficulties and often of revealing the solution. At the end of the retreat there is none of the jolt of re-entry when the rubber hits the road and the ideal meets the reality.

What a wonderful apostolate the email retreat offers to our future senior Jesuits who have been using their personal computer throughout their lives to record and store their inspirations and insights into the Spiritual Exercises. Now they can share all of this practical wisdom through an email retreat with anyone in any part of the world by a simple “click of the mouse.” And in doing so, they will discover, just as I have, that the Lord once again has saved the very best wine till last.

1) Laugh about the craziness. Got a crazy family who always argues about the same thing every single time they get together? “I CAN’T BELIEVE YOU BROUGHT THAT UP AGAIN!” Don’t get angry; get perspective. Unless you’re the Messiah and can work miracles, you’re probably not going to change them. So stop trying. You’re driving yourself nuts. You can be open and loving, but you can also be realistic.

2) Laugh at things that are supposed to be funny. There’s plenty of funny holiday-themed humor out there. If you’re not tickled by Grandma Got Run Over by a Reindeer (which I am not) there’s always A Christmas Story, (“You’ll shoot your eye out!”), which airs on TV 24/7 from Thanksgiving to Christmas, so you’ve got no excuse not to smile at least once in November and December.

3) Laugh at yourself. As Jesus said to the disciples, “Get over yourself!” (Well, he should have said it.) Stop taking yourself so seriously. Your coworkers thought that your Christmas tie was ugly? Maybe it is. Someone didn’t like your “Famous Mulled Wine” or your “Christmasy Ginger-Pumpkin Nutbread” handed down from your great-grandmother? Get over it. Life’s too short to take yourself too seriously.

To read the full post on ways to survive this time of year, check out the full blog post here.

Fr. Martin is the author of the new book Between Heaven and Mirth: Why Joy, Humor and Laughter Are at the Heart of the Spiritual Life (HarperOne), which, he would like to say, makes the perfect gift for any holiday.

For this year’s Teach In, Jesuit Father Agbonkhianmeghe Orobator, provincial of the East African Province of the Society of Jesus, was the keynote speaker who discussed the issues facing his province today. During his time at the Teach In, National Jesuit News interviewed Fr. Orobator about the challenges that the Society of Jesus faces in Kenya, Uganda, Tanzania, Ethiopia and the Republics of the Sudan in the North and South.

“I think the unique mission of the Society of Jesus is that we are able to think ‘outside of the box’.” I think that is very unique to Jesuits,” says Fr. Orobator. “We can work in parishes, we can run schools, we can run communications centers, we can run many different apostolates, but we can do it in a way that is unconventional.”

The theme of this year’s event was “The Gritty Reality: Feel It, Think It, Engage It,” derived from a speech given by former Jesuit Superior General, Father Peter-Hans Kolvenbach, in 2000 entitled, “The Service of Faith and the Promotion of Justice in American Jesuit Higher Education.” Kolvenbach said, “students, in the course of their formation, must let the gritty reality of this world into their lives, so they can learn to feel it, think about it critically, respond to its suffering and engage it constructively.”

You can watch National Jesuit News’ interview with Fr. Orobator below.

Today, Gillick is a retreat master, leading retreats throughout the country. He currently resides in Omaha, Nebraska and in involved in the Jesuit community at Creighton University. He is loved by many students and is always ready to listen to them and provide counsel. At Creighton, he serves as a student mentor and presides at regular mass at Creighton’s catholic church, St. John’s.

In this video, Fr. Gillick shares the story of his vocation.

His research interests have included the investigation of abnormal gene regulation in cancer and ethical issues in human genetics, including the ethical and social ramifications of molecular genetics research. He is an expert on ethical issues in personalized medicine, pharmacogenomics, human cloning research, stem cell research, and genetic testing.

Fr. FitzGerald recently sat down with National Jesuit News to discuss how being a priest and a scientist go hand-in-hand, and how the Church should learn to anticipate upcoming ethical questions.

Fr. Arroyo currently serves as the Alabama Associate for the Jesuit Social Research Institute. Based out of New Orleans, the Jesuit Social Research Institute, JSRI, works throughout the Gulf South doing research, analysis, education, and advocacy on the issues of poverty, race, and migration.

You can listen to our podcast with Arroyo via the player below. You can also read his testimony in front of the Alabama’s state legislature by visiting the JSRI site here.