Mother Teresa’s Rx: Soup, TLC

--The “greatest disease today . . . is to be unwanted,” said Nobel peace laureate Mother Teresa as she dedicated a women’s shelter and soup kitchen on Chicago’s impoverished West Side. The facilities were “our gift to the people of Chicago . . . especially for people who need tender loving care,” said the 74-year-old Roman Catholic nun and founder of the Missionaries of Charity. Mother Teresa said she saw no irony in bringing her mission from the crowded streets of Calcutta, India, where it was founded 35 years ago, to one of the wealthiest nations of the world. “The number (of impoverished people) is less, but there is the same hunger for love, the same hunger for food. You cannot spend your time comparing, or you get nothing done,” she said.

--Harvard Divinity School has awarded tenure to a woman professor for the first time in its 169-year history. Margaret Miles, who became a full professor of theology, told a school paper in Cambridge, Mass., she thinks it is “shameful” that it took so long to award tenure to a woman. “On the other hand, it’s great to be the first, and, since I can’t change the past, I might as well enjoy being the first,” she said.

--A cookbook inspired by orthodontic braces tight enough make Penelope McJunkin of Richmond, Ind., swear off solid food is being marketed across the country. It’s called “The I Hate to Chew Cookbook: A Gourmet Guide for Adults Who Wear Orthodontic Braces.” Not long after McJunkin was fitted for braces, she grew tired of subsisting on “milkshakes and mashed potatoes,” and her husband, Jack, started cooking. The book, published by Straight Status Inc. of New Castle, Ind., may be of help to denture wearers and persons recovering from oral surgery also, Mrs. McJunkin said. The recipes will “nourish you without making you chew and without necessarily making you fat.” They include pear sorbet, poached trout in champagne, green vegetable casserole and Irish coffee mousse.

--Frank Sinatra Jr. says the “Doonesbury” comic strip may be losing popularity and perhaps that is why his father became a target for cartoonist Garry Trudeau. The younger Sinatra added that he was sorry that the cartoonist decided to “lash out at an American icon.” In his cartoons recently, Trudeau portrayed the elder Sinatra as an admiring acquaintance of organized crime associates. “If I were threatened with cancellation, I’d do something real fast to generate some publicity,” the younger Sinatra said. “The best way to get noticed is to take someone that everyone loves and admires and knock him,” he said. “What he did was in bad taste, but he is a satirist like James Thurber and Jules Pfeiffer and he has a right to speak his mind.”