After being part of a team of reporters that won a Pulitzer Prize at New York Newsday in 1992, Jim Dwyer went on to earn his own Pulitzer as a columnist in 1995. When New York Newsday expired in 1995, he landed at the Daily News, managing at the same time to write three books. Last year, ready for a change and discouraged by the shrinking role of tabloid columnists, a national phenomenon, he moved to the New York Times, and returned to straight reporting. But whatever the genre or assignment, Dwyer remains a writer known for his unique voice.

Dwyer’s solid build, medium height, square, bearded face, and quick mind give him the aspect of an agile cinderblock. He carries himself like a street reporter, ready to move fast or stand still for hours, and squirms at any attention others give to the man holding the pen. Such reticence is typical of journalists, and also of the Irish-Catholic tribe from which Dwyer hails. Happily, the anonymity of a newspaper byline-few people remember a reporter’s name-usually deflects the unwanted spotlight. When I ask Dwyer if a Catholic vision animates his work, we are soon discussing the reaction of other people-not himself-to September 11, which he covered extensively for the Times.

"I don’t know if I am, or if everyone is, driven by some form of our better angels. If you look at how people behaved on September 11-and I’m not talking about just firefighters or rescue workers, I’m talking about citizens who were unguided by any civic leadership or any instructions other than of their own consciences-how people behaved that day in lower Manhattan, it was so profound and potent, you’re almost intoxicated by it. Some of it is very much like the deep rituals that people of Christian and other faiths practice."

In the weeks after the attacks, Dwyer heard about a man who escaped the World Trade Center, who only fell apart emotionally weeks later when he realized he had lost the pen he carried out with him. So Dwyer conceived a series of articles, called "Objects," on material items that resonated in special ways following September 11. For Dwyer, the altruism of that day, which could be captured in the stories about the objects people used and came to prize, sprang from a deep goodness that could be seen in terms of universal archetypes.

"One of the ’objects’ I did was a paper cup, or a plastic water cup. Everyone I spoke to about that day who was suffering from effects of that blast or collapse talked about strangers giving them water. . . it could have been the blood of Christ.... ’For I was thirsty, and you gave me to drink.’ These are primitive, instinctual things that people were doing." Though these acts of mercy resonated in terms of the Gospels, Dwyer said they transcended religious categories.

The collapse of the buildings was physics, "cold and unyielding," Dwyer says. But the city’s response was something else. "You have thousands of people running from this, and you have thousands of people in the street trying to help them within minutes-within minutes. I don’t mean to try to describe this as an optimistic event. As a historical circumstance, you can’t explain this with biology, you can’t explain this with electrons and protons...there’s no biological imperative there, just people sharing the common cup."

Idealism and facts-of-life bluntness have served Dwyer well. Rex Smith, editor at the Times Union in Albany, New York, befriended Dwyer at Columbia’s Graduate School of Journalism in 1979-80. "There was never any doubt in any of our minds that Jim was the best reporter. From the beginning, he had a sense of how to find a story and he had the right ethic. He was always a reporter to fight for the little guy. I think his Jesuit education shaped that."

Dwyer’s journalistic instincts were formed by a lifetime in Manhattan and a childhood as the son of immigrants. His parents, Philip and Mary, emigrated from Ireland, Kerry and Galway respectively, and met at the Caravan Dance Hall on 59th Street. They raised four sons on East 95th Street, where the couple lived until this year when they moved to another apartment in Manhattan. Dwyer’s father worked as a boiler operator and public school custodian; his mother was a nurse at Bellevue. (Two of their other sons are lawyers, one is an engineer, and all live in the New York area.)

The neighborhood was a classic New York mix, with working-class Irish immigrants in rent-controlled apartments just blocks from the swells on Park Avenue. Both sets attended church at Saint Ignatius Loyola, at 84th and Park, "this magisterial Jesuit presence," said Dwyer.

The changes of the 1960s and 1970s roiled the neighborhood, as they did all of New York. "It was in a giant collapse-the race riots, Vietnam, the white flight, the industrial flight. You don’t know this as a kid, but we were standing on a bluff and the sand was rapidly eroding. It was the end of a world, from my birth in 1957 to 1977."

A silent tide had already shifted under the city. A surge of immigrants, especially from Asia, Russia, and Latin America filled the city’s boroughs and a twenty-year economic climb began. And since September? "We don’t know where we are now," says Dwyer.

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Back to reporting

In the earth-quaked world of New York after 9/11, Dwyer has been tracing the city’s new map. When he joined the Times in the spring of 2001-the paper of record had approached him several times over the years-he did so as a general assignment reporter on the Metro desk. Dwyer also writes occasionally for the Sunday magazine and the culture section, where he is able to speculate about the possible connections between the popularity of a Vermeer exhibit at the Metropolitan Museum and the best-selling novel, The Girl with a Pearl Earring, whose main character is a maid and model for the artist.

Giving up his columnist’s pulpit at the News was not easy. The money was good, and the freedom and prestige enviable. "It was a great forum. You could sometimes help people who were facing a raw deal, and other times look at a larger picture and people would respond to that." In March 2000, when the police shot an unarmed black man, Patrick Dorismond, then-mayor Rudolph Giuliani posthumously criticized the victim.

"And what could any of these grand figures say?" Dwyer wrote in his News column. "Perhaps the first word of sorrow, sympathy, or regret.

"Anything.

"Anything other than what was said by Mayor Giuliani, whose public rants all but declare the killing of Dorismond a public service."

Dwyer’s strong opinions often pushed city leaders to speak out. Other columns helped cool enthusiasm for the building of sport stadiums at public expense. That sort of influence, and a generous paycheck, held him in the job. "I had to drag him out of there," his wife, Cathy Dwyer, says.

Though he laments the declining appetite among publishers and editors for hard-hitting big-city columnists, Dwyer says he was ready for a normal byline. "I was a columnist for fifteen years, and I wrote something like fifteen hundred to two thousand columns. Writing three times a week, it was a perpetual-motion machine. I am much happier to write only when I have something to say."

Dwyer was particularly well equipped for reporting on September 11. He knew the issues, the players here and abroad, and the politics from writing a book, Two Seconds under the World (Crown, 1994), about the previous terrorist attack on the World Trade Center.

"It’s a story Jim was made to cover," says Kevin Doyle, a classmate and friend of Dwyer’s from Fordham University. Doyle is New York State’s capital defender, in charge of a team of lawyers who represent suspects facing the death penalty. "He had written a book already on the topic," Doyle said. "And nobody straddles the world of international politics and blue-collar workers as well. He has a respectful, unromantic rapport with the uniformed services people, and he easily switches to covering other worlds."

"Now memories orbit around small things," began the first of Dwyer’s "Objects" series for the Times. Then came the tale of six men, one a window washer, who escaped from an elevator trapped between floors in the north tower by cutting through three layers of wallboard with the metal edge of two squeegees. The men ran out of the building five minutes before it collapsed. In fewer than a thousand words, Dwyer captured the drama, the horror, the heroics, and the survival of average New Yorkers acting in extraordinary ways.

Other articles in the "Objects" series featured a sweatshirt worn by a paramedic who tended to buried survivors, handcuffs used to dig people out, daffodils to be planted in a city park by a father who lost a son, and the cane used by a blind man learning to navigate the new map of lower Manhattan. Readers responded with a gush of messages. "One woman had three voice mails because she kept breaking down," Dwyer says. Like a good Irishman, Dwyer knows that a story can be a shortcut to the truth.

Gail Collins, editorial page editor at the Times who worked with Dwyer at New York Newsday, explains Dwyer’s gift. "The hardest thing for a columnist to do really well is sincere. It’s easy to do funny, easier than falling off a log, but he can do both." A good example is a loopy passage from Dwyer’s Newsday column, "Subway Lives": a snake escapes from a passenger’s duffel bag on the D train and the motorman radios a commander, who doubts his ears.

"Is it a live snake?"

"Very much so."

"All right. Make an announcement that the train is going out of service. Evacuate the passengers."

"The snake already did that."

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At home in Washington Heights

Jim Dwyer met Cathy Muir while both were students at Fordham in the Bronx. The couple have two daughters, Maura, sixteen, and Catherine, nine. Cathy is a musician-trombone and baritone horn-who teaches computer science at Pace University in Manhattan and has written two textbooks in the field. She also has roots in Ireland, home to her maternal grandparents.

The Dwyers live in the Washington Heights section of Manhattan, once popular with German Jews and Irish Catholics but now also crowded with young professionals and Dominicans. Their home combines two apartments in a 1950s building that casts a shadow over the shrine of Saint Frances Xavier Cabrini, the American patron of immigrants. We speak in the study just off their living room, where a row of windows looks west to the Hudson River and the Jersey Palisades. Dwyer settles into a brown leather club chair and props my tape recorder at his arm. His daughters, off from school for the week, entertain themselves and interrupt only to check before they head off to rent a video and make a stop at the park.

"I did an excellent job this morning, getting Catherine a haircut and stopping by the library for a bunch of books," Dwyer says with the proud air of a home-from-work dad. Cathy Dwyer admits the strain of Jim’s long hours. "He is a workaholic, that’s important to him." Dwyer himself recounts how, when he was grinding away on a book in the off-hours, his younger daughter told him: "I always know where to find you. You’re either asleep or writing your book."

Dwyer, meanwhile, says his family makes his life possible. He credits Cathy for adjusting the family’s spending habits to accommodate the drop in salary that followed his switch from being a brand-name columnist at a tabloid to being a more anonymous reporter at a sober broadsheet. "I guess one of the surprises of heading into the third decade of married life," says Dwyer, "was to discover again how emancipating marriage truly is: to discover, on the one hand, freedom from the plagues of loneliness, empty consumption, and the soul-withering treadmill of working primarily to make bags of money, and on the other hand, to taste the elemental joys of life."

Dwyer explains: "If you don’t have big pocketfuls of cash, you’re more likely to be at home cooking a meal or doing homework with the kids."

The Dwyers themselves were touched directly by the horrors and fears of September 11. As Jim watched the tragedy on television from home that morning, a friend called to ask if he wanted to speak to someone trapped in the building.

"I talked, maybe three times between 9:15 and 10, with James Gartenberg and his secretary, Patricia Puma, who worked in some kind of real estate place. During the conversation, he explained how a wall had collapsed and blocked their access [to an exit]. They were in Tower One, the first one hit, the second to fall....I told them I know it’s uncomfortable, but they’ll [the rescue workers] get to you. I had listened to the 911 tapes from 1993, and they had eventually gotten to everyone."

Dwyer tried to reach senior staff in emergency services, without luck, though others called 911 on Gartenberg’s and Puma’s behalf. He told the trapped pair of his conversations with the towers’ structural engineer, Leslie E. Robertson, for Two Seconds under the World, and of how the blueprints for the towers anticipated sabotage. "The act of sabotage they conceived of was a plane crashing into the tower. I told them this and I said don’t worry, it will not knock the building down. I told them to seal the doors with wet clothes."

At 10 a.m., tower one fell and Dwyer lost contact. "Then my father called and asked, ’What about Maura?’"

Jim pauses and dabs his left eye. His daughter attends Stuyvesant High School, just north of the trade center. Jim and Cathy’s efforts to locate Maura were futile. As it turned out, after Stuyvesant was evacuated, Maura walked to a friend’s apartment uptown. "I later heard from my father-in-law, by e-mail, that he had talked with her and she was okay. That night, we all slept in the same room, as did every family in the city."

In the days that followed, Maura responded to her traumatic experience by working twelve-hour days as a volunteer. "When she was little we used to go swimming at a Y on the East Side, and we would go out to the deep end of the pool and float along with each other. I felt she was a buoy, keeping me up. I had that same sensation after September 11, with her productive, instinctive response." Maura and her classmates saw bodies falling through the air and were evacuating Stuyvesant when the second tower collapsed. "She could have curled up in a ball and she didn’t," Dwyer recalls. "As terrible as those things are, she wanted to see what she could do to help others."

What happened to Gartenburg and Puma, the people in the tower? "They died," Dwyer says. He pauses before resuming.

"Isn’t that an amazing thing what people did in those last hundred minutes of their lives? They weren’t talking about hate or ’get these bastards.’ They were calling people and saying ’honey I love you, I love the kids, I love my mother and I love my father.’ I guess that’s what everybody does, but it was something to see, you know, three thousand people in a row doing that."

The Times initially began running daily profiles of missing persons, but then switched to doing so for all those who died, a feature that won the newspaper a Pulitzer Prize for Public Service. "Within days, it evolved into a national bulletin board, and early on everyone agreed that these should be about how people lived, not how they died," Dwyer says. "It was a way of unpacking the unreality into real pieces." The series continued on a daily and then a weekly basis for many months, and most are collected in a book, Portraits 9/11/01: The Collected "Portraits of Grief" (Henry Holt & Company, 2002).

"You see this [kind of response] in a lot of rural countries," Dwyer says. "I’ve seen it in Ireland-everybody in the parish shoulders the coffin as they carry it from the church to graveyard. I felt that series of profiles in the Times had this sensibility, the impulse of putting your shoulder under the coffin of someone from the community, and carrying it for a few feet."

Family and origin explain other aspects of Dwyer’s perspective. "Jim, as a first-generation American, stands in two worlds at the same time," says Cathy. "Not many journalists have that voice." More than most reporters, Dwyer understands the trajectory of immigrants and their children, for whom "leaving home is like splitting the atom, unleashing waves of energy that propels a generation or two into the future." He remains close to his parents and has visited his relatives in Ireland several times, most recently with his daughters and father.

He brought this past to bear in an article for the Times Magazine. The story of one family that lost someone in the World Trade Center told the story of America, land of immigrants, and the gain and loss that come with each generation’s assimilation. Readers were shown the world of Inwood, the northern tip of Manhattan that was once a two-parish Irish enclave and is now populated with a new diaspora from the Caribbean. A few Irish grandparents stay on. Their grown children have moved to the suburbs but remain tightly knit through reunions, the Internet, and word-of-mouth jobs in the professions-police, fire, and high finance-that were particularly hard hit on September 11.

The article focused on Mike and Peg Meehan, who lost a son, Damian, one of nine children. "I really liked the people, the Meehans, and I felt like I was in my own apartment where I grew up on 95th Street, talking about the kids playing sock football in the hallway." Dwyer attended Damian’s funeral before seeking out the family. His description of the Mass was rare for the concise way in which he wove an explanation of the liturgy into a picture of everyday life and a meditation on the passage of time:

"At every Catholic Mass, the faithful affirm their belief that life follows death, as it did in the Resurrection of Christ. They believe that bread and wine are transformed into the substance of the divine, and that when the priest says the blessing and passes the cup, all can eat and drink from the goodness of God....

"Outside, the raucous streets somehow fell under the same spell that held the church in perfect stillness. The buses on Broadway halted. The livery cabs hushed their horns. Birds swooped from sunshine to shadow. The world seemed poised at some holy moment as the people of the parish, those who had gone and returned, those who had stayed and lived, poured from their church. The faces were older than they had been, but for a moment, it could have been a day in 1961, when Mike and Peg Meehan first climbed the stairs to their apartment down the block and began their American lives."

Dwyer’s Irish nature shows in a resistance to revealing anything personal, in a loving skepticism, in a spark that betrays his stolid mien. His parents and ethnicity, says his old friend Kevin Doyle, endowed Dwyer with "a pretty idealistic but unromanticized view of things."

Raymond Schroth, S.J., Dwyer’s journalism professor at Fordham and now Jesuit Professor of Humanities at Saint Peter’s College in New Jersey agrees. He mentions several qualities evident in Dwyer’s life that do not often coincide: absolute integrity, "the tolerance of a good Irish Catholic," an eye and heart for the suffering of others, and an unrelenting outrage "at the misbehavior of other people." Dwyer deploys all these qualities in his writing, which has been significantly influenced by the "New Journalism" of the 1960s, which used literary techniques to better convey the facts.

"He’s a first-class writer with a vivid imagination that allows him to talk in pictures," Schroth says. In a piece for the "Objects" series about a blind man finding new sensory landmarks in post-9/11 Manhattan, Dwyer showed even a knack for capturing the fleeting tapestry of sounds that compose any New York scene. "The lost streets near the trade center had been rich with invisible clues about where things stood, how people moved, when traffic surged. The thwack-thwack pulse of a revolving door released wedges of sound and air; that was the entrance to a Borders bookstore near the corner of Church and Vesey." Outside the church at Damian Meehan’s funeral, Dwyer emphasized the visual, describing how birds dart from the light to shadow; in another "Objects" installment, it’s not just a sack of bulbs but "a mesh bag of daffodils" lodged against a tree root waiting for the gardener to be roused from his grief.

In his work, Dwyer lives by a simple creed: "You have to get it done right." He means more than just the facts.

"You can screw up facts, which I don’t suggest is forgivable, but plainly misreading a situation, not examining the basis for believing that a certain shape is the form of the truth-that’s very serious." The reporter’s real goal is to capture the truth beyond the facts. And that truth may emerge only when a reporter bites on to it with his teeth, and pulls.

In the early 1990s, Dwyer wrote a then-controversial series of columns advocating universal testing of babies for hiv and notification of mothers. Though all babies were being tested for public-health reasons, their mothers were not always notified of the results because of a state law designed to protect mothers’ confidentiality.

"At one point I was afraid I lost sight," Dwyer says. "Maybe this reform would inflict greater damage and it would expose the mothers to some kind of danger in their households, within their lives or their livelihoods, due to prejudice or discrimination. Those things could have been true." As it turned out, his worries were unfounded and his advocacy on point. Newborns are now routinely tested and their mothers notified.

And here Dwyer acknowledges the constant search for the delicate balance between a journalist’s sense of mission and professional detachment. He quotes Yeats: "The best lack all conviction, while the worst / Are full of passionate intensity."

"My guess is that in the modern ideal, the best reporters would lack all conviction, and there are very good people who are extremely detached. I would count myself as very agnostic politically, for instance." But he eschews the detachment that slides into cynicism. Dwyer is most comfortable in the space between apathy and zealotry, where he can bring compassion and an eye for the disadvantaged to his work.

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Faith, works & stories

One does not easily pin Dwyer down about his religious faith. As Cathy Dwyer notes, with some exasperation over the church’s recent sexual-abuse and cover-up scandals, "It’s hard being Catholic these days." She does credit the experimental Catholic middle school Jim attended, the now closed Monsignor Kelly, for developing his sense of social justice. Others who know or read him mention Loyola High School or Fordham. Few mention Catholicism in any theological sense. Jim says little on the topic of faith beyond the church’s institutional aspect.

"I’m not sure the sex-abuse crisis is current, or limited to sex. To me, it looks more like a crisis arising from power abuse than sex, and epochal in nature rather than a spasmodic eruption.

"That’s a little pompous, I guess, but when a monsignor in Queens can run off with a couple million dollars in church funds, as happened a couple of years ago, you realize how many of the Vatican II reforms fell apart in this country, particularly when it comes to administration of parishes locally, rather than by guys in pointy hats.

"I’m very disappointed that they haven’t figured a way out of the trap of their past-the administrative collapses that are under way and the human moral collapse with these scandals," he says. "That’s strictly a personal observation."

Dwyer cites a shrinking clergy and the failure to laicize church administration as envisioned by Vatican II, and the absence of a plan for the church in America "ten years from now, twenty years from now in terms of secular worldly power." Nevertheless, he adds, "the spiritual influence of the faith remains."

Despite disillusionment, Dwyer’s writing exhibits fundamental elements of Catholic tradition, especially an incarnational sensibility. God made the world, and even the most humble of objects-a squeegee, daffodil bulbs, a dirty sweatshirt-can convey the truth of things and do great good.

"He is capable of reading virtually everything, any opinion or perspective, so that we will discern some truth in it," says Kevin Doyle. For instance, Dwyer sees the love of neighbor shown by thousands on September 11 as people "acting out of instinct and reflex rather than instruction and compulsion."

He will wrestle aloud, briefly, with the deeper truths of the faith. I ask him now, if faith can exist with reason. "I think it can. The deeper you get into science, the more preposterous a godless world, a godless universe, is."

Dwyer’s suspicion of dogma only highlights all the more his preferred method of conveying the truth. "Religious values are first and best conveyed through storytelling," he says. "A child hears the story of the loaves and the fishes, and sees how a stupendous miracle can come from the smallest act of generosity-sharing the scraps of a meal." Values are also learned by example, and he recalls teachers at Loyola High School who taught him fearless moral and intellectual scrutiny. Yet today, Dwyer finds little guidance in the works of religious thinkers, and is especially critical of religious figures who continue to justify capital punishment.

"What is more instructive on the death penalty: the vaporous parsings of theologians who are trying to resist the pope’s pretty explicit guidance on capital punishment, or the words of Jesus on the cross, telling the thief next to him, this day you shall be with me in paradise? How can it be that a criminal is good enough for heaven, but not for earth?"

Some who know Dwyer only from a distance nevertheless recognize the pedigree. "His point of view is Irish Catholic often, no question about it, and that’s good," says former Mayor Ed Koch. "There is a lot of anti-Catholicism in this world, just as there is a lot of anti-Semitism in this world." Though an occasional target for Dwyer in the past, Koch praises his commentary. "He always backed up what he had to say. I could disagree with him, but he never made anything up."

wyer excels at confronting difficult and uncomfortable topics. Though grief over loss and the impulse to honor heroes were fitting after September 11, these emotions can obscure the truth of what happened and why people died. Some of the heroes of 9/11 died needlessly. "What has now emerged is that you had 400 people-343 firemen and the police-who died inside buildings that were empty of rescuable people. We are in the capital of the world in communications, and our firemen can’t send and receive orders, we can’t instruct people in these situations? I find that hard to believe," Dwyer says.

"We can have better communications and we can have a structure that does not put even brave people at jeopardy when there is no longer benefit to their bravery, so that we don’t squander their bravery." Improved radio communications and the better coordination of emergency services would have significantly reduced the number of firefighters and others who died in the rescue effort.

Dwyer is also worried about the hidden biases at work in how the heroes of the terrorist attack have been celebrated. "Being made into a god is not a good fit for any man or woman," he says. He thinks that those outside the city’s uniformed services, such as the security people who died guiding others out of the trade center, are being neglected because of a "disproportionality in the bestowing of laurels."

As his comments indicate, Dwyer’s passion for truth and his often lyrical writing seem unmuted by the Times. One might expect someone accustomed to the exposure and influence a tabloid columnist has to shrink a bit to fit into the pages of the world’s most influential newspaper. Not so. "They don’t step on the voice," he says. "The key is: Learn their rules, their customs. It’s like learning the form of a sonnet, and the voice fills the form." He talks like a man who finally landed in the best possible post for his talents.

"All newspapers are propelled by the fact that you have to put the thing out the next day. So the collection of inane, half-baked, wished-you-hadn’t-said-it stuff that runs in newspapers is there mostly because there’s a clock.

"People outside newspapers think there’s a design. There is not. There’s a clock. The Times, too, is governed by the clock. But at the Times, more than any other place that I have worked, there are the resources, the horsepower, the brainpower, the desire to beat the clock."

At Columbia, Dwyer’s friends included future Albany Times Union editor Rex Smith; Richard Goldensohn, whose premature death from a heart attack Dwyer and others memorialized with a fund for grants to independent journalists; Lena Sun, a foreign correspondent and editor at the Washington Post; Margaret Scott, a magazine writer; and Julie Talen, a screenwriter. They often met at the 94th Street apartment of Goldensohn, who had a son to watch in the evening.

"I remember sitting around and talking about when we got to the New York Times what our bylines would be," Smith recalls. "Would we use our middle initial? Mine would be Rex W. Smith, Dick would be Richard something Goldensohn. Jim’s would have been James G. Dwyer, I think. But Jim said no, he was always determined that it would be Jim Dwyer. Dick and I agreed that Jim wouldn’t change for the Times, but that the Times would change for Jim."

After long hours inside Dwyer’s apartment, I walk with him up his block and into Fort Tryon Park, its granite stairs and retaining walls like the battlements upholding a civic vision of New York as an eternal and public place with breathing room for all. We stop on a stone promontory and look out over northern Manhattan and the west Bronx: Inwood, Marble Hill, Fordham Hill, University Heights spread out under darkening clouds. Spots of reddish light from a setting sun drop on various landmarks: JFK High School, the Emigrant Savings Bank clock tower, the Hall of Fame on the old NYU campus.

Seeing this classic view of New York City, I mention the popular "Law & Order" TV police dramas, which make good use of the city’s streetscapes. "That is the most utterly fascist show-do you ever see a good depiction of a defense lawyer or suspect?" Dwyer blurts out. "And the police and prosecutors can do no wrong."

And then he’s off, expounding on the failings of another group of citizens or civil servants or politicians or other self-seekers. Here Dwyer’s essentially Catholic outlook is apparent: All people sin, more often by stumbling than by design. All are capable of redemption. And the source of evil, or at least the door by which it enters, is the most prosaic of the seven deadlies, sloth. Dwyer concludes a short peroration on someone’s misdemeanor (never mind who; the cause of wrongdoing is universal). "And this sort of thing, it usually comes about because people just aren’t willing to put in a full day’s work."