Monastery

A s Pico Iyer puts it, he moves between different environments more quickly than most people. For example, the intrepid, reflective travel writer had just left his home in Japan, stopped over in Hawaii, and landed in Santa Barbara, Calif., to visit his mother. Iyer will be on this coast to discuss his new book about Graham Greene, "The Man Within My Head," on Feb. 2 at 4:30 p.m. at Wellesley College's Newhouse Center for the Humanities and at the Harvard Book Store on Feb. 3 at 7 p.m. BOOKS: What is your favorite Graham Greene book?

SANTA FE – It seems almost inevitable that Tabla de Los Santos restaurant in the Hotel St. Francis would be run by chef Estevan Garcia. Like the rest of the property, the "table of the saints" has an austere Spanish Colonial decor that suggests a monastery — and Garcia is a former Franciscan friar. Garcia grew up in New Mexico's upper Rio Grande valley, watching his mother cook for a family of 11. Before entering the religious order, he honed his skills as a line cook in Santa Fe restaurants.

JERUSALEM - Vandals attacked a monastery in Jerusalem and a prominent school with a mixed Jewish-Arab student body yesterday, and police said they suspected Jewish extremists were behind the violence. "Death to Christians" and other Hebrew-language graffiti were scrawled on the Greek Orthodox monastery in Jerusalem, while "Death to Arabs" was sprayed across a wall outside the bilingual "Hand in Hand" school in another part of the city. Israeli police said they were investigating both incidents.

By day, George Seaforth prepared meals in Cambridge at the Society of St. John the Evangelist monastery, where he lived an unadorned life in a guesthouse room and delighted the monks with his cooking skills. Most nights, he performed on drums with jazz musicians and bands passing through Boston. As that scene became less vibrant and demand dimmed for a talented sideman, he started playing at clubs in the Combat Zone, where walking to work might mean strolling past drug dealers.

I’ve covered the museum world for almost 15 years now, but I’ve never encountered anything quite as nutty as I did the other day in Petra, the ancient Jordanian city featured briefly in “Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade.’’ We turned a corner and walked up some steps to find a man who identified himself as the director of the “Petra Archeological Museum.’’ He seemed nice enough, and we chatted a bit near the museum entrance....

ZAAFARANA, Egypt - The country’s antiquities chief unveiled the completion of an eight-year, $14.5 million restoration of the world’s oldest Christian monastery yesterday, touting it as a sign of Christian-Muslim coexistence. The announcement at the 1,600-year-old St. Anthony’s Monastery came a month after Egypt’s worst incident of sectarian violence in more than a decade, when a shooting at a church on Orthodox Christmas Eve killed seven people. The attack raised heavy criticism of the Egyptian government abroad and at home, by critics who say it...

BETHLEHEM, Conn. -- Mother Benedict Duss, a physician and founder of one of the first female Benedictine monasteries in the United States, has died. She was 94. Mother Benedict, the first abbess of the Abbey of Regina Laudis, a Catholic Church order, died at the abbey on Sunday, Sister Angele Arbib said. She had been in declining health for years. The community of 37 nuns, who hail from around the world, pray and farm on the 400 acres in Bethlehem, spending most of their time behind the abbey gates, away from public view.

A Tibetan rights group said Sunday that around 10,000 Tibetans were reportedly gathered around a monastery in western China where a nun set herself on fire last week in apparent protest against Chinese rule. The 35-year-old Buddhist nun died Thursday in predominantly Tibetan Ganzi prefecture in Sichuan province. She was the 11th Tibetan monk, nun or former monk to self-immolate in western China in recent months. New York-based Students for a Free Tibet said in an emailed statement Sunday that around 10,000 Tibetans from across Sichuan had reportedly gathered...

TONGREN, China - A Tibetan monk crouched in the quiet courtyard of a nearly deserted monastery and bitterly recalled the words he and his fellow monks have been forced to recite every year at government-organized classes: "I love this country. " The "patriotic education classes" have been imposed on the monks for the past decade, but the young monk in the centuries-old Rongwo monastery still can speak his own mind to a journalist. "We want freedom," he said. "We want the Dalai Lama to come back to his land.

LEON NEYFAKH'S Feb. 12 Ideas piece on the context of the birth of Boston's City Hall touches on architects Gerhard Kallmann and Michael McKinnell's "admiration of European architects like Le Corbusier," but ignores the building's direct relationship to that latter architect's Monastery of Sainte-Marie de La Tourette in Eveux, France. It is surprising that so few observers see the connection between these two architectural masterpieces. The monastery's construction began in 1956, and whether consciously or otherwise, the architects of City Hall owe much to this earlier work.

WADI NATROUN, Egypt (AP) — Pope Shenouda III, an giant figure for 40 years at the helm of Egypt's Coptic Orthodox Church, was laid to rest on Tuesday in a desert monastery after a moving funeral Mass at a Cairo cathedral attended by tens of thousands. Shenouda's death brought an outpouring of expressions of Muslim-Christian unity in this mainly Muslim and conservative Arab nation, but it may have done little to hide the alarm of Egypt's Christians over the political ascent of Islamists.

LEON NEYFAKH'S Feb. 12 Ideas piece on the context of the birth of Boston's City Hall touches on architects Gerhard Kallmann and Michael McKinnell's "admiration of European architects like Le Corbusier," but ignores the building's direct relationship to that latter architect's Monastery of Sainte-Marie de La Tourette in Eveux, France. It is surprising that so few observers see the connection between these two architectural masterpieces. The monastery's construction began in 1956, and whether consciously or otherwise, the architects of City Hall owe much to this earlier...

Another Tibetan Buddhist monk set himself on fire in western China amid a wave of such protests against China's handling of the vast Tibetan areas it rules, overseas groups said Saturday. Tamchoe Sangpo set himself alight Friday during a prayer ceremony at Bongtak monastery in a remote region of Qinghai province, the advocacy group Free Tibet said. It gave no details about his current condition, although U.S.-funded broadcaster Radio Free Asia said he had died. The reports said Sangpo was around 40 years old and had been one of the monastery's leaders after returning from three...

JERUSALEM - Vandals attacked a monastery in Jerusalem and a prominent school with a mixed Jewish-Arab student body yesterday, and police said they suspected Jewish extremists were behind the violence. "Death to Christians" and other Hebrew-language graffiti were scrawled on the Greek Orthodox monastery in Jerusalem, while "Death to Arabs" was sprayed across a wall outside the bilingual "Hand in Hand" school in another part of the city. Israeli police said they were investigating both incidents.

A s Pico Iyer puts it, he moves between different environments more quickly than most people. For example, the intrepid, reflective travel writer had just left his home in Japan, stopped over in Hawaii, and landed in Santa Barbara, Calif., to visit his mother. Iyer will be on this coast to discuss his new book about Graham Greene, "The Man Within My Head," on Feb. 2 at 4:30 p.m. at Wellesley College's Newhouse Center for the Humanities and at the Harvard Book Store on Feb. 3 at 7 p.m. BOOKS: What is your favorite Graham Greene book?

LONDON - A monastery should no longer be allowed to run a London Roman Catholic school where pupils were physically and sexually abused over several decades, an independent report recommended yesterday. Lawyer Alex Carlile found 21 cases of abuse since 1970 at St. Benedict's School, which is run by the Ealing Abbey monastery. The private Catholic school, whose students are ages 3-18, is coed but was mostly male for decades. Former pupils have made allegations of abuse dating back to the 1960s Carlile wrote that the abuse had been "mostly - but not exclusively - as a...

MOSCOW -- The Danilov Monastery's original 17th century bells ended up at Harvard University 73 years ago -- spared the destruction of a state atheism campaign. Now the monks are hoping to get them back. The 18 bells stopped ringing in Russia after dictator Josef Stalin closed the monastery in 1930 and turned it into a camp for orphans as part of his campaign against religion. All but three of its monks were later executed. The bells, however, were saved from being melted down when American industrialist Charles R. Crane bought and then donated them to Harvard in Cambridge.

CHARLESTON, S.C. -- Brother Boniface Schnitzbauer, known for his breads, cakes, and pastries at the Trappist monastery near here, died Wednesday at the Trappist monastery where he had lived since 1952. He was 96. Brother Boniface, who treated cooking and baking as if they were sacraments, was the oldest monk at Mepkin Abbey in Moncks Corner, about 30 minutes from Charleston. Born William Schnitzbauer in Wurzburg, Germany, in 1908, Brother Boniface immigrated to the United States and found work as a barber in Manhattan as a young man. He saw action as a medic in World...

A Tibetan rights group said Sunday that around 10,000 Tibetans were reportedly gathered around a monastery in western China where a nun set herself on fire last week in apparent protest against Chinese rule. The 35-year-old Buddhist nun died Thursday in predominantly Tibetan Ganzi prefecture in Sichuan province. She was the 11th Tibetan monk, nun or former monk to self-immolate in western China in recent months. New York-based Students for a Free Tibet said in an emailed statement Sunday that around 10,000 Tibetans from across Sichuan had reportedly gathered around the Tawu...

The first trial opened Monday in the cases of three Tibetan Buddhist monks charged with murder in western China over the self-immolation death of a colleague in what was described as a political protest. The March 16 death of Rigzin Phuntsog, 16, was seen by fellow monks and observers as a political protest against China's heavy-handed controls on Tibetan Buddhism and provoked a standoff between security forces and monks. Authorities accuse two monks, Tsering Tenzin and Tenchum, of plotting, instigating, and assisting in the self-immolation.