Editor’s Blog

Hollywood, freeways, the aerospace industry, the beach, the mountains, Olvera Street and the Dodgers — they all probably would be found on most people’s lists of iconic images of L.A. life.

Turn any corner in Los Angeles, and a mural may appear: Our Lady of Guadalupe gracing a bodega wall, or chamber musicians eight stories tall on a downtown parking structure. The Homeboy Industries mural, “Jobs Not Jails,” is found at Learning Works, at 1916 E. First St. in Boyle Heights.

In late November 1860, 10 years after statehood and the Gold Rush, botanist William Brewer, an Easterner, arrived in Los Angeles with the California Geological Survey to travel the state of California and study its natural resources.

Look to the heavens on a cloudless, moon-free night: That expanse of stars has sparked the biggest thoughts the human brain can think. How strange to learn that, in galactic terms, we see only over our backyard fence.

Commencement is a rare moment that is both end and beginning. The day seems stretched by its gravity, its hours elongated by ceremony. But the rite, a tenuous instant in time, passes. It doesn’t last long.

“Humility,” said T.S. Eliot, “is the most difficult of all virtues to achieve; nothing dies harder than the desire to think well of self.” I think of humility as medication for pride, which is one of the seven deadly sins and maybe the biggest. Pride is a treatable affliction — it can be controlled reasonably […]

Yesterday, Jan. 24, Brenda (Kirsch) Frketich ’06 was included in a front-page Washington Post story about women farmers. She earned a bachelor’s degree in business administration at LMU and now runs Kirsch Family Farms, which has been in her family for four generations, in Oregon’s Willamette Valley. Written by Elizabeth Zach, the piece explores a […]

The last gift of a Jesuit may be one given after he dies.

Today marked the passing of one of the most gracious public figures I have ever met: Stan Chambers. Over the course of six decades, Chambers become a symbol of the news business at its best as well as one of its most admired reporters. Chambers attended Loyola University for three years and was part of […]

We learned this week that freelance writer Sandra Millers Younger hauled in an award for LMU Magazine on the strength of her writing. Younger wrote “Operation Huck Finn,” a feature in our fall 2013 issue about a group of students who in 1959 reenacted Huck Finn’s fictional trip down the Mississippi River in Mark Twain’s […]