Today’s New York Times (yes, Cathy, there is life [and death] after “The Sopranos”) has a lament by Michael Goldfarb on the demise by suicide of his alma mater, Antioch College.

Here’s the mournful ending:

I grieve for the place with all the sadness, anger andself-reproach you feel when a loved one dies unnecessarily. I grievefor Antioch the way I grieve for the hope of 1968 washed away in a tideof self-inflated rhetoric, self-righteousness and self-indulgence.

Theideals of social justice and economic fairness we embraced then arestill right and deeply American. The discipline to turn those idealsinto realities was what Antioch, its community and the generation itled was lacking. I fear it still is.

And the screen goes black.

Robert P. Imbelli, a priest of the Archdiocese of New York, has contributed to Commonweal for fifty years. A selection of his essays and reviews, some of which first appeared in Commonweal, has been published as Christ Brings All Newness (Word on Fire Academic).

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