Excerpt from the memoir, Take Off Your Shoes: A Memoir of Sr. Carrie, by Quinn Rooney.
‘It was late September 2005. I was working in Arlington Heights, Illinois with Faith Community Homes, a multi-faith organization working on homelessness. I had gotten a bunch of shoes together to help some of the needy families, and I came across a clean but scuffed pair of black tennis shoes. Suddenly, one of the mothers came to mind. Her name was Susan, but she preferred Sue, and she had the most worn out shoes that I had ever seen. They were old, ratty, athletic shoes, covered with dirt and filled with holes. I knew that they were a bit too small for her, because whenever she walked there was always a tinge of pain that showed on her face like a passing cloud on an otherwise sunny day. What I remember most about those shoes was the clip-clop, clip-clop of the soles, bouncing back and forth between the floor and the bottom side of her shoes, as they moved along the linoleum floor of Faith Community Homes Center.” Click here to read more.
Excerpt from “Depth, Universality, and Learned Ministry: Challenges to Jesuit Higher Education Today,” by Adolfo Nicolás, S.J.
“I think the challenges posed by the globalization of superficiality – superficiality of thought, vision, dreams, relationships, convictions – to Jesuit higher education need deeper analysis, reflection, and discernment than we have time for this morning. All I wish to signal here is my concern that our new technologies, together with the underlying values such as moral relativism and consumerism, are shaping the interior worlds of so many, especially the young people we are educating, limiting the fullness of their flourishing as human persons and limiting their responses to a world in need of healing intellectually, morally, and spiritually.” Click here for article.
Excerpt from the memoir, Looking-Glass Woman, by Kathy Vaillancourt.
“To most people, my grandfather Edwin “Poppy” Moore was a distinguished newspaper editor and columnist. To his grandchildren, he was a wonderful white-haired wizard. He wrote letters in yellow crayon from the Golden Goose, who promised us gifts of frog skins on our birthdays. He pulled pennies from our ears and noses. He made candy canes appear in our pillowcases. But his greatest magic act took place every Saturday night, when he conjured up his invisible genie, the Gin-Gin Man.” Click here to read more.
Quinn Rooney (1992-2012) discovered his genius at the age of 18. His memoir of Sister Carrie, SLW, Take Off Your Shoes, is a superb example of extreme beauty and, more importantly, an outstanding example of what a young person can do when he works hard to fashion his own genius. What makes Quinn’s story unique is that he was battling a rare form of brain cancer when he enrolled in Dan’s Aesthetics Civic Engagement course in fall 2010, where each student was paired with a sister to preserve her legacy through memoir. Quinn met every challenge of the task with wit, wisdom, and a dogged determinaton to get the job done, and done well, no matter what. Thank you, Quinn, for inspiring us and for sharing your genius with us and the world. Click here to read the memoir.
-Edmund Burke
“A capacity, and taste, for reading, gives access to whatever has already been discovered by others. It is the key, or one of the keys, to the already solved problems. And not only so. It gives a relish, and facility, for successfully pursuing
the [yet] unsolved ones.
-Abraham Lincoln
“Do not read, as children do, to amuse yourself, or like the ambitious, for the purpose of instruction. No, read in order to live.”
-Gustave Flaubert
