Usually when we columnists are targeted by a group of letter writers, we can expect grief. Most of the time, the responders want to protest something or other.
They probably feel irate about an opinion that strikes them as outrageous and they want the columnist to get it right or, at least, to suffer from their feedback.

For me, however, it did not work that way last week. The five correspondents ─ two from Texas, one from Arkansas, one from North Carolina, and one from Staten Island ─ all wrote friendly messages in longhand.

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On November 23, 1968 I spent the afternoon high on the roof of venerable Harvard Stadium. That vantage point afforded me a spectacular panoramic view of Boston and Cambridge. It also provided a privileged downward view of the most storied football game in Ivy League history.

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If asked to predict, what personal traits do you think would make later life happy?

Having studied the matter for decades, psychiatrist George Vaillant has made his choices. His two top candidates are: social aptitude and the capability not to abuse alcohol.

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To view your country’s leaders from abroad can be an instructive experience ─ even when “abroad” is a country as near and as friendly as Canada. That happened to me last weekend when visiting with friends in Montreal.

Hearing French spoken and recognizing certain cultural differences create shifts of perspective about the United States. This helps explain why Barack Obama’s commencement speech at Notre Dame made such an impact on me. I watched it on a Canadian television channel that, to my surprise, broadcast the talk from beginning to end.

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Our rapid-fire exchange reminded me of London in the eighteenth century. Or James Joyce’s Dublin, at the beginning of the twentieth.

In those times and places, people were accustomed to sending a letter to a friend and getting a response delivered on the very same day! In an age without telephones, the postal service made correspondence almost instantaneous.

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Many, if not most, of my Catholic friends have adult children whom they raised in the Catholic faith but who no longer profess themselves Catholic.

Among these middle-aged or older parents, this fact often provokes discussion. They wonder how this happened, how their childrens’ strong Catholic upbringing did not “take.” Sometimes, they confess to being unhappy at this outcome.

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On the evening of May 10, 1941, Rudolph Hess, the Deputy Leader of the Nazi Party, parachuted out of a Messerschmidt Me 110 and landed in a field near Glasgow, Scotland.

This event took place at one of the crucial turning points in World Was II. I was 12 years old at the time and I remember being baffled by the news of what Hess had done. Why had Hitler’s second in command undertaken such a strange journey?

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