Its name means “mound of the dead,” but in its time Lothal was anything but moribund. It was a thriving seaport, part of one of the world’s oldest civilizations.

In the same way that Egyptian civilization developed along the Nile, Mesopotamian on the Tigris-Euphrates rivers and Chinese along the Yangtze, there arose a civilization in the fourth millennium BC in the Indus River Valley in the area that is now Pakistan and northwestern India. It was called the Harappan Civilization,...

by Julie Skurdenis

Last month I described three Guaraní-Jesuit missions my husband, Paul, and I visited in Argentina in August ’07. This month I’d like to describe two more, these in Paraguay, that we visited on a separate trip several weeks after seeing the Argentinian missions.

Jesus Mission

The first of the two Paraguayan missions we visited, Jesus de Tavarangüe, was founded in 1685. Located 25 miles north of Encarnación, Jesus Mission followed the usual Jesuit...

by Julie Skurdenis

I’m not sure how surprised the monks who lived here 400 years ago would be to hear the soft sounds of bossa nova echoing in the cloisters where they once lived and prayed. No doubt, chanting and church music would have been more familiar to them, but I suspect that bossa nova would not have shocked them. After all, I was in Salvador da Bahia, Brazil, where music is an integral part of everyday life. It was probably the same in 1586 when the first Carmelite friars...