Culture

America’s former editor in chief, Thomas J. Reese, S.J., described our new pope recently in The National Catholic Reporter as one who had previously been “a little-published, low-profile Latin American archbishop.” In other words, we know relatively little about him, even though he has had a long career in the church.

In Sacred Dread Brenna Moore offers a fascinating account of the life and times of Raïssa Maritain, one of the more hidden, yet highly influential figures of the intellectual revival known as the renouveau catholique. Married to the prominent Catholic theologian Jacques Maritain, the Jewish-born Raïssa converted to the Catholic Church in 1909 and spent much of her life pursuing a spiritual life through silence, prayer, the reading of mystical texts and exchanges with important artists and intellectuals of her day.

Athanasius Kircher was a German Jesuit who taught, wrote and ran a museum at the Roman College in the mid-1600s. He was famous in his time, sought out and consulted. His more than 40 books, folio-sized and thick, were rich in engraved illustrations. They covered subjects from magnetism to light and sound, from languages to Egyptology, from China to Italian geography. His popular museum gathered specimens sent to Rome by missionaries in Asia, Africa and America. But he made mistakes, and some dismissed him as a fraud.

Having rendered some of the more majestic prose in American fiction, F. Scott Fitzgerald is often cited for a line that has always seemed to me to make very little sense: “There are no second acts in American lives.” What? Of course there are. Second chances are the stuff American dreams are made of. Let’s not forget Richard Nixon. Redemption may not be American. But America, by definition, is all about redemption.

Antonio González, a Spanish theologian who worked for a number of years in Guatemala and El Salvador, is presently on the instructional staff of the Fundación Xavier Zubiri, a teaching and research center in Madrid. (Zubiri was a Spanish philosopher whose thinking had a profound influence upon Ignacio Ellacuría, S.J.) An earlier work, The Gospel of Faith and Justice, appeared in 2005; a number of other titles have not yet appeared in English.

When things go wrong in Latin America, the tendency is to write new laws or a new constitution. But new laws rarely remedy the situation because Latin America’s major problems are rooted in deep historical realities that condition attitudes and practices, which in turn undermine the democratic process. In this well-researched and up-to-date study, Ignacio Walker explains to the reader in clear language why democracy has had so much difficulty taking hold from Mexico to Chile.

If an author’s affection for her characters were sufficient to create good drama, Nora Ephron’s Lucky Guy would be a masterpiece. This sprawling, splashy, new Broadway infotainment arrives less than a year after the death of Ephron, who also penned iconic rom-coms like “When Harry Met Sally” and “Sleepless in Seattle.” It administers a sloppy wet kiss to the rough-and-tumble tabloid journalism of New York City in the 1980s and ‘90s, and its heroes are the newsmen who peopled that brassy, boozy, bareknuckled world.

When Harry Jaffa sent a copy of his book Crisis of the House Divided to Roy F. Nichols, the eminent Civil War scholar, on the 100th anniversary of the Lincoln-Douglas debates in 1958, Nichols wrote back: “Congratulations, you are the first historian to have read these debates in their entirety.” John Burt, a literary scholar from Brandeis is now the second person who has analyzed in great detail the philosophical and political views of the two major politicians from Illinois in the mid-19th century.

No other Western artist is quite like Piero della Francesca, the Quattrocento Italian painter who disappeared from public awareness for centuries after his death in 1492 and was then dramatically rediscovered in the late 19th century. It’s not that he is the greatest of painters—although Aldous Huxley famously called his “Resurrection” “the best picture in the world,” and any museum holding one of his rare works will certainly rank it among its treasures.

When I was a Maryknoll seminarian in the 1950s, we all had to read a biography of Blessed (now Saint) Theophane Venard, a priest of the Société des Missions Étrangères de Paris (MEP) who was martyred in Tonkin, now a part of present-day Vietnam, in 1861. Published as Modern Martyr, the story had been written by James A. Walsh, the founder of Maryknoll, and was presented as an inspiration for the mission of Maryknoll in particular and the American Catholic mission to Asia in general.

Andrew Solomon’s new book is a masterpiece of dogged research and persuasive writing. Solomon interviewed more than 300 families to learn how parents cope with severely handicapped or difficult children. The chapter titles indicate the book’s breathtaking scope: “Deaf, Dwarfs, Down Syndrome, Autism, Schizophrenia, Disability, Prodigies, Rape, Crime, Transgender.”

Parents of these children suffer emotionally and physically—wracked by feelings of guilt and failure. Divorce, regret and depression are common.

John LaFarge, S.J., is one of the best known Catholic advocates for racial justice in the 20th century. Born to an aristocratic family in Newport, R.I., in 1880, Father LaFarge graduated from Harvard in 1901 and then traveled to Austria, where in 1905 he was ordained and joined the Jesuit order. He worked for several years on a Jesuit mission in southern Maryland and then moved to New York, where he became an editor of the Jesuit weekly America.

If Herman Melville’s writings can be used as evidence, the trend began almost before the last shot was fired. Eager for reconciliation with their erstwhile enemies, Northern commentators on the Civil War frequently hastened to gloss over the treasonous aspects of secession and to divert attention toward more admirable features of the South’s rebellion—namely, the quality of its military leadership and the tenacity of its soldiers under fire.

In the Bible, salvation regularly occurs by the most unexpected of paths. In a world that gave everything to the eldest boy, the Bible finds its heroes regularly in the younger son. In a society that rooted a woman’s status in marriage and children, Scripture turns to the barren and the widowed. And before a landscape of mighty powers, each more dangerous than the next, the Old Testament declares God has chosen for his own the tiniest of nations, while the New Testament proclaims liberation is to be found in a crucified man.

In London’s Mayfair district, a monument honors the World War II alliance between Britain and the United States, symbolized by the friendship between Prime Minister Winston Churchill and President Franklin D. Roosevelt. Statues of the two statesmen, smiling broadly, are seated at opposite ends of a park bench. While the gap between them likely was arranged in anticipation of the many tourists who now are photographed as they sit between the two statues, the space actually captures something true about both Churchill’s personality and his patriotism.

Anne Butler’s Across God’s Frontiers: Catholic Sisters in the American West, 1850-1920 explores a topic as vast as the geography in its title. For American historians, the knowledge that Catholic nuns were virtually everywhere on the North American continent is not a revelation. The breadth and scope of their endeavors, however, is now assembled and ex-plored in a wonderfully readable volume.

If it only had a brain, one is tempted to suggest, Oz the Great and Powerful might have been as welcome as spring. Still, it is not an entirely brainless movie or completely lacking a heart. And it certainly has nerve: Positioned as the very presumptive heir to “The Wizard of Oz,” perhaps the single most beloved movie in the American canon, the new film might as well have a target on its back in the shape of a bullseye, next to a sign saying, “Kick me.”

“God can handle honesty and prayer begins an honest conversation,” the spiritual writer Anne Lamott asserts. Moments when she approached, even accepted it, honesty occurred when prayer was spontaneous, inarticulate.

In the last decade or so, more than 2,000 migrants have died in the Arizona desert while crossing from Mexico into the United States. Most die from lack of water during the treacherous, days-long trek, including one woman named Yolanda González, who gave her baby her last sip of water before perishing herself.

Reading Kill Anything That Moves was a disturbing and emotional experience for me. I found myself tearing up, gagging at times, as I turned the pages. The book released ghosts long buried in my psyche, stirring memories of anger and bitterness: anger at arrogant policymakers; bitterness at a seemingly indifferent public.

"Crucifixion,” a wall-sized oil painting created by Renato Guttuso (1911-87), one of Italy’s finest modern painters, is widely recognized as a 20th-century masterpiece today. But a year after the painting was unveiled in Rome in 1941, during World War II, it sparked controversy. Guttuso, who had made an international debut by winning first prize at the prestigious Premio Bergamo in 1938, was in the process of establishing an international reputation as an artist.

“There are innumerable books about Jesus.” So begins the preface of Gerhard Lohfink’s volume, Jesus of Nazareth, translated from the German original. So why another Jesus book? In the first place, Lohfink contends that every generation must encounter Jesus anew. Even more pressing, Jesus’ proclamation and practice of the reign of God represent “the only hope for the wounds and sicknesses of our planet.” The author thus presents his portrait of Jesus, the distillation of a lengthy and distinguished career of research and writing.

Pablo Picasso spent the summer of 1910 in Cadaqués, Spain. Among the paintings he did there were several that took his cubism to an almost entirely abstract extreme. In “Woman With a Mandolin,” for example, both the figure and the instrument are scarcely legible. His dealer found the work “unfinished,” and Picasso never again flirted so daringly with abstraction. “There is no abstract art,” he later said. “You always have to begin with something.

In the October 20, 1928 issue of America, the editors of the magazine inaugurated the Catholic Book Club with the following notice:

Odds are, if you have checked out the entertainment section of a newspaper recently, you have heard something about House of Cards, Netflix’s first major original series. Perhaps you have heard the fact that in February Netflix released all 13 episodes of the program’s first season at once; or that any number of people watched all 13 episodes in the first weekend (they are known by the flattering term “binge viewers”); or that the quality is quite high—maybe not quite as strong as AMC or HBO, but aspiring to greatness.

Akinwande Oluwole Soyinka, known as Wole, born in 1934, is a Nigerian writer, playwright and poet. Recipient of the 1986 Nobel Prize in Literature, he has fought for years for human rights and was imprisoned by his government during the civil war in Nigeria and Biafra for almost two years in the late 1960s. He is currently professor in residence at Loyola Marymount University in Los Angeles. He writes with insight, blindness, humanism and anger in this wonderful and disturbing essay Of Africa.

Perhaps I am cynical, or perhaps it is simply because I live in California, but the term enlightened primarily evokes images of Lululemon yoga pants, chi excavation and quasi-Eastern sayings wrapped up firmly in the latest issue of O, the Oprah magazine, which sits untouched on the floor of a bright shiny S.U.V. So when I read that HBO had given the green light to a series titled Enlightened back in 2011, my pupils reflexively headed northbound.

The most crucial swing vote in the 2012 presidential election may well have been cast by the late Rachel Carson. Much was made, back in November, of the boost New Jersey’s Republican Governor Chris Christie may have given President Obama in the wake of Hurricane Sandy. Less noticed, however, was the endorsement by Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg of New York, motivated by what the billionaire mayor described as a looming global warming crisis.

A few months ago the biggest controversy in the war among scholarly biographies was between Henry Weineck, author of Master of the Mountain: Thomas Jefferson and his Slaves (Farrar Straus and Giroux), who presents Jefferson as a founding father who violated the principles he expressed, who said he hated slavery, but owned 600 slaves, and Jan Ellen Lewis, who calls Master of the Mountain “a train wreck of a book” by an author blinded by his loathing of Jefferson (Chronicle of Higher Education, Nov. 23).

Thomas Jefferson was the closest thing to a philosopher-king we have ever had in the United States. Jon Meacham’s eminently readable and balanced new biography aims to recover the “mortal Jefferson,” both philosopher and politician, who blended the two roles in a way that reveals something to us of “the art of power.” Jefferson the wielder of power emerges more clearly in the book than Jefferson the thinker, and this is not surprising.

“Woe to you who are rich!” (Lk 6:24), said Jesus. “It is easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for one who is rich to enter the kingdom of God” (Mt 19:24). Agrarian peasants in first-century Galilee no doubt cheered at such indictments of the wealthy in their zero-sum economy, which was marked by stark income inequality. But how did the economic message of Jesus ring out centuries later, when in the late fourth and fifth centuries—for the first time—the church became rich?

Reinventing Bach is a curious and wonderful book, delightful and challenging at the same time. Among musicologists and classical music lovers, Johann Sebastian Bach’s place in the canon of western music is secure, but what Paul Elie demonstrates is that Bach has a place much bigger than that. His music continues to engage on so many levels.

A fella ain’t got a soul of his own, just a little piece of a big soul, the one big soul that belongs to everybody.”

—Henry Fonda as Tom Joad
The Grapes of Wrath” (1940)

His movies are filled with compelling images and characters: a prostitute and an outlaw who ride off into the sunset; a self-absorbed commander who gets all of his men killed; an obsessive, tortured loner who sets out on an epic quest; a hero who isn’t all he appears to be.

As a biography, Seeds of Fiction appeals to the reader who tires of salacious details about a subject’s personal life. Bernard Diederich writes with a discrete respect for his subject and tells us they were close friends. “I knew enough not to intrude. I was in awe of Graham…,” he begins, and then much later, “I knew little of Graham’s personal life.” This is all as if to say: It was none of my business.

This is an important book on religion, morality and law. In Law’s Virtues, Cathleen Kaveny, a legal scholar and moral theologian, argues that law “can, should and does” function as a moral teacher even in the United States, a pluralistic representative democracy committed to individual liberty and legal laissez-faire. What she offers here is “a constructive appropriation and application of Thomistic legal thought to the contemporary context,” consistent with her standing in the legal academy as a leading proponent of Roman Catholic jurisprudence.

Superstorm Sandy brought climate change back into public consciousness with a vengeance. Although no single weather event can be directly linked to climate change, Sandy’s devastation offered an undeniable preview of the kinds of extreme weather events we will face regularly in a warming world.

Colm Tóibín’s The Testament of Mary tells an intriguing, though not always convincing story. Its main character, and to an extent its only character, is an old woman fretting about her past as she tries to get the facts straight. Given the book’s title and story line, one assumes that the woman is Mary, the mother of Jesus of Nazareth, although the identity of the characters is not clearly defined. If this were just any old woman, the book would probably garner no interest.

We’ve all had those moments in December when we clicked through the channels and found It’s a Wonderful Life nearly everywhere. Yet it would be tragic if the past over-exposure of Frank Capra’s 1946 film fooled us into seeing it as anything less than a masterpiece. What’s more, the film offers a profound understanding of the Gospels.

Is George Bailey a saint? Not exactly. He might just be lucky or unlucky or human.

Brendan Purcell’s From Big Bang to Big Mystery is a unique contribution to the understanding of human origins. No one else has explained so clearly why creation and evolution are both needed if we are to understand ourselves. The external record of evolution charted by science is incontrovertible. But so is the long history of the symbols by which human beings interpret the source of their existence. Neither perspective can be jettisoned. We do not have to choose between an evolutionist and a creationist account. Human origins must be understood on both paths simultaneously.

Philip C. Kolin, author of Reading God’s Handwriting, and Paul Mariani, of Epitaphs for the Journey, are Roman Catholic poets who allow their beliefs to infuse their poetry. They are also intellectuals who avoid the cloying quality found in some religious verse. Their best poems have a mystical—almost sacramental—quality and seem reminiscent of works by Gerard Manley Hopkins, S.J.

Anyone with a desire to preserve our planet has no choice but to see Chasing Ice, the gorgeous, inventive documentary released last month. As of this writing it has been shown to selected audiences but has yet to reach the popularity of a film like “An Inconvenient Truth.” Give it time, however, and hopefully further promotion, because it is truly revelatory. Produced by Paula DuPré Pesmen and Jerry Aronson and directed by Jeff Orlowski, the film is a unique pictorial about global warming, which left me impressed, thoughtful and sad.

There’s a classic bit of advice for actors: Walk into the audition thinking of yourself as the solution to the director’s problem; be that solution and you’ve got the part. Closing the deal is a steeper challenge for the cutthroat salesmen in David Mamet’s 1983 masterpiece Glengarry Glen Ross, now getting a gripping if lopsided Broadway revival starring Al Pacino. The customers these salesmen go after—mostly offstage, with one telling exception—must be convinced they have a problem in the first place, one that only a costly real estate investment can solve.

I turned the 1,781 pages of the works of J. R. R. Tolkien with some pangs of guilt. I felt that we all had more pressing things to do than slip away from the world of our daily experience—turning our backs on the inner city to tramp over and under the Misty Mountains with hobbits, ores, trolls, elves and deep-throated singing dwarves.

Certain dates in history have a powerful hold on the American imagination. When we think about World War II, we remember Dec. 7, 1941—a date President Franklin Roosevelt proclaimed would forever live “in infamy.” Our minds also turn to D-Day, June 6, 1944, when Allied forces led by General Dwight D. Eisenhower landed in northern Europe and helped seal the doom of the Axis powers. We may also recall Aug. 6 and 9, 1945, when atomic bombs dropped from U.S. airplanes exploded in the skies over two Japanese cities.

For the Jewish people, Peter Fink, S.J., once wrote, God is the one who “comes,” who “leads,” who “abides” and who “hides.” The early Christian community appealed to the same four dynamics in speaking of Christ: “the Christ who comes (‘maranatha’), the Christ who leads (‘I go before you’), the Christ who abides (‘I am with you all days’) and the Christ who hides (‘You are the body of Christ’).” (Worship: Praying the Sacraments, Pastoral Press, 1991).

Anthony Shadid put his life in harm’s way so many times that his death in February 2012 has come to seem foreordained. Here was a reporter who made his name in the crosshairs of war: in Iraq, of course, but also in Israel and Lebanon. In 2002 he was shot by an Israeli sniper in Ramallah while reporting for The Washington Post. The episode put an end to his fraying first marriage and foreshadowed his ultimate end. Shadid died on assignment for The New York Times, felled by an asthma attack as he and a colleague were crossing the Turkish border from Syria.

In December 2000, with electoral campaign passions subsiding, the Bush presidential transition teams attempted to inoculate the incoming administration against blame for the inevitable bust end of the longest running boom in U.S. history by invoking the R-word, “recession,” to which the Clinton White House replied with another R-word, “ridiculous.” Now comes the Nobel laureate in economics and New York Times columnist Paul Krugman with a D-word, “depression.” Should we respond with the D-word “disagree”?

I came to Mary C. Sullivan’s biography of Catherine McAuley with several entrenched assumptions about the level of interest a 19th-century Irish founder of a women’s religious order could possibly inspire. These assumptions were handily challenged by the narrative sweep that Sullivan maps out for the subject, who founded the Sisters of Mercy in 1831. Sullivan’s highly focused, though somewhat uneven exploration of Catherine’s life and times reveals that Catherine McAuley was socially shrewd yet intensely spiritual, fragile yet capable, forceful yet full of warmth and humor.

The name of the Rev. Jerry Falwell tends to excite and/or rile the emotions of American Christians in a way that few other 20th-century clergymen can claim. Michael Sean Winters provides an even-handed and insightful biographical exploration of the legendary pastor, who began with meager resources but built a fundamentalist juggernaut that influenced and shaped American political life in the late 20th century and set the stage for the divisive political battles of the early 21st century.

My wife and I own a house in Detroit, a city of 139 square miles with 700,000 residents but only one first-run movie theater. I missed the two-week window during which the theater was showing Detropia, so I had to drive 50 miles, round-trip, to a far western suburb to see this documentary about the immense challenges confronting my city and the people who, either by choice or necessity, are facing them head on. “That was a real ‘feel good’ film,” one of the three other viewers in the theater said with sarcasm as the film concluded.

Dana Gioia’s new book of poems, Pity the Beautiful, offers a series of powerful meditations on loss and the redemptive power of beauty to sustain the soul through the most harrowing of hells. This is Gioia’s fourth book of poems and his first collection in 12 years. The long hiatus was occasioned by Gioia’s six-and-a-half-year service as chair of the National Endowment for the Arts under President George W. Bush. His long and successful foray into the realm of public service has served Gioia well as a poet.

Opinion is divided among artists, critics and fans alike as to whether Andy Warhol was the greatest artist of the second half of the 20th century. But there is greater agreement that few, if any, rivaled his influence—much like Marcel Duchamp in the first half of the century. The discussion, perhaps foolish to begin with, is nevertheless complex.

In the papal admonition of the archbishop of Mainz in 1233—whose title "Vox in Rama," alludes to Herod's slaughter of the Innocents—Gregory IX describes the initiation rite of a particular heretical sect in Germany,

Marc Lynch, a professor of political science at George Washington University, has written one of the best books to date on the popular revolts that have swept the Arab world over the past two years. The Arab Uprising is a very readable overview of these remarkable events, suitable both for those with background in Middle Eastern politics as well as those less familiar with the region.

John Patrick Diggins was raised a Catholic but said “in the early 1950s I lost my faith and found my mind.” He went on to be a distinguished American intellectual historian, the author of books on such diverse cultural figures as Abraham Lincoln and Eugene O’Neill. He died in 2009 before completing a manuscript of the present book. (The final version was assembled by his partner, Elizabeth Harlan, and his most prized student, Robert Huberty).

Can anyone hold a candle to Jonathan Franzen in the world of contemporary American belles lettres? Perhaps the best candidate was the late novelist David Foster Wallace, whose unfinished posthumous novel The Pale King was a finalist for the 2012 Pulitzer Prize (which was ultimately unawarded). Farther Away, a new essay collection by Franzen, includes among its most poignant moments Franzen’s reflections and ruminations upon the life and death of his friend and fellow literary darling.

It is common knowledge that Martin Luther (1483-1546) changed the religious landscape of Western Europe. Fewer of us are familiar with Lucas Cranach the Elder (1472-1553), the most prolific and arguably the most accomplished artist of the time. And only specialists know that the two were close friends who struggled together on a united front for many of the same goals. Steven Ozment, a distinguished Harvard historian, scrutinizes this relationship between theologian and artist and argues that working in tandem, they shook “the foundations of established religion and established art.”

Buy land. They’re not making it any more.” This fitting quotation from Mark Twain opens the scathing investigation by the British science writer Fred Pearce of how “Wall Street, Chinese billionaires, oil sheiks, and agribusiness are buying up huge tracts of land in a hungry, crowded world.” With prose that is well-honed in style but blunt in relating the facts on the ground, Pearce reports his findings from the year he spent circling the globe to document the phenomenon of “land-grabbing.”

In each generation and in many languages, writers have sought to interpret Francis of Assisi anew. In a significant book that will play an important role in the continued debate over this elusive medieval holy man, the Dominican historian Augustine Thompson offers what he subtitles “A New Biography”—new not just because it was released this year but also, as he writes, because it “presents a new portrait of the man.”

Hildegard of Bingen (1098-1179), one of the most accomplished persons of the entire Middle Ages, finally has been officially declared a saint and is to be named a doctor of the church this month. She was a polymath with many roles, including those of scholar, scientist, botanist, ecologist, healer, preacher, writer, visionary, church leader and Benedictine spiritual guide. She sprinkled justice and compassion for the poor throughout her writings and composed chants with meditative melodies. She also painted mandalas, which are circles filled with colors, shapes and symbols.

The result of the work of a three-year “interest group” that brought together a remarkable number of theologians at the 2009, 2010 and 2011 conventions of the Catholic Theological Society of America, Richard Gaillardetz’s book is an effort to address what he calls the “pronounced magisterial activism” that began under Pope John Paul II and continues with Pope Benedict XVI. He shows in the Introduction that the contemporary magisterium is largely a product of the 19th century. The church of the Middle Ages recognized various modes of teaching authority and a diversity of voices.

Our parents occupy our lives “in a place that precedes thought.” Something subjective and tribal joins us while we live and allows for objectivity only after a parent’s death.

As children we hope for lasting happiness, but a premonition of our parents’ mortality teaches us that joy is always precariously balanced. When the external forces of violence, ideological struggles and dangerous governments define a society’s structures, happiness becomes all the more ephemeral and death an “impalpable ghostly presence.”

From autumn 1967 to autumn 1968, I lived in Paris researching a history dissertation on the quandaries of anti-war French left-wing intellectuals who confronted the rise of Nazi German power in the 1930s. I was also marching alongside French, Vietnamese and other American protesters in demonstrations against the war in Vietnam.

Somewhere between a documentary and a comedic fable, Namir Abdel Messeeh's first feature film is a welcome diversion from the current climate of strife and sectarian violence in the Middle East. A French-Egyptian co-production, The Virgin, the Copts and Me follows Namir's touching yet challenging journey back to his roots. A young Frenchman like any other, his identity is strongly influenced by his mother's departure from her homeland, Egypt, in 1973, shortly after the resignation of former President Abdel Nasser.

When Sister Helen Prejean, C.S.J., published her prophetic masterpiece Dead Man Walking, some capital punishment diehards tried to spin her story of death row inmate Patrick Sonnier into an argument for execution. Sonnier, the argument went, would never have repented for his grievous wrongdoing had he not been facing imminent death at the hands of the state. With A Different Kind of Cell: The Story of a Murderer Who Became a Monk, W. Paul Jones dispels such nonsense and provides an inspiring account of redemptive transformation.

Attending one of the many sold-out shows of The Master, directed by Paul Thomas Anderson, during its opening weekend in New York, I had the misfortune of sitting next to a young man who not only had a laugh like a French poodle's hiccup, but erupted in bewildering mirth at almost everything that happened in the film. When the movie's central character, maladjusted war veteran Freddie Quell (Joaquin Phoenix), drank photographic chemicals in his undying effort to remain intoxicated, the kid cracked up.

In America’s busy-buzzy, easily distracted media culture, who among us can be reliably counted on to do the homework assignments? Sooner or later, many of us opt for the drive-thru version of whatever Topic A happens to be at this very instant, finding it faster to riff, tweet and link our way to a wobbly position.

The movement of people from one country to another, which is one of the principal characteristics of globalization, has been an inescapable part of the Irish consciousness for more than a century and a half. “No custom has been more native to the country than getting out of it,” wrote the critic Terry Eagleton of Ireland’s sad history of emigration, in which her greatest export was her sons and daughters. An unexpected chapter of that story is now being written after the demise of the Celtic Tiger.

Are corporations people? This pivotal question, advanced by the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision in the Citizens United case in 2010 that expanded the rights of corporations to influence elections, has animated a very spirited debate as the presidential election heats up. Can groups (including corporations) be expected to act as good citizens? Or are they inevitably less moral in their motives and actions, as President Obama’s favorite theologian, Reinhold Niebuhr, argued 80 years ago?

Robert Scully’s 400-plus page story of the Jesuit mission in Elizabethan England and Wales offers a detailed and extensively footnoted account of the lives, imprisonment, banishment and sometimes gruesome execution of Catholics from the arrival of the first Jesuits in England in 1580 until the death of Queen Elizabeth in 1603. It is difficult to understand, living as we do in a pluralistic and relatively secular society, the worldview that led to the religious persecutions of Reformation-era Europe and even more difficult to understand the worldview that led someone like St.

The damning statistics that introduce Tears of Gaza, a searing, 81-minute documentary by the Norwegian director Vibeke Lokkeberg, include the following: On Dec. 27, 2008, Israel began a 22-day-long rocket attack on densely populated Gaza, an area inhabited mostly by civilians. Of the 1,387 people killed, 773 were unarmed, and most were women and children; 257 were under 16. A total of 5,500 were wounded, of whom 1,800 required long-term care. And 20,000 buildings were destroyed.

Pope John Paul II, in his apostolic letter Rosarium Virginis Mariae (2002), proposed the addition of five Luminous Mysteries to advance “a revival of the Rosary...as a true doorway to the depths of the Heart of Christ” by filling a biblical-Christological gap within the traditional contemplation of scenes only from the Gospel stories of the incarnation, passion and glorification.

I am not sure if the English poet Philip Larkin (1922-85) ever behaved in public as badly as many other poets have done, but he did so privately and plenteously, to judge from his letters, biographies and unpublished poetry. For a while it was the thing to disparage his work from the point of view of political correctness. You could argue he was sexist, racist, anti-Catholic, anti-Semitic, etc. He was a poetic Dirty Harry; he hated everyone—except schoolgirls in plaid skirts, about whom he wrote a bit of soft pornography.

This year the Shakespeare Theatre Company in Washington, D.C., which for 25 years has given pleasure to some 2.5 million theatergoers, won the Tony Award for regional theater. In holding that honor the company joins two earlier winners: the Oregon Shakespeare Festival in Ashland and the Utah Shakespeare Festival in Cedar City. Shakespeare is much appreciated, read and performed in the United States.

In a recent essay, Marilynne Robinson described the work of a writer as the continual attempt to “make inroads on the vast terrain of what cannot be said.” If we can take our cue from Ms. Robinson, John Donatich’s first novel, The Variations, attempts inroads into this terrain, but does not always succeed. And for this simple reason: with The Variations Donatich has attempted to stitch two books into one.

Gerard Lemos, a former visiting professor in China from the United Kingdom, paints a disturbing picture of the failure of China’s extraordinary economic growth to benefit hundreds of millions of Chinese citizens. After conducting a remarkable survey in China, Lemos links the economic problems and fears of ordinary Chinese to the policies of China’s authoritarian leadership, both local and national. Although most of Lemos’s research occurs in Chongqing, where the recently deposed Politburo member Bo Xilai was party secretary, the problems he describes exist throughout China.

When reading Rez Life, be prepared to have a struggle over what the book is and what you might like it to be. Part history, part social analysis, part memoir and part journalism, the book takes the reader through the reservation life that the novelist David Treuer, who is Ojibwe, has experienced from his days growing up among Minnesota’s reservations to today, when he shares his time between the Leech Lake Reservation in Minnesota and Los Angeles, where he is professor of literature and creative writing at the University of Southern California.

Until now, the most powerful depictions of Hurricane Katrina’s impact on New Orleans and the gulf region I have seen are Spike Lee’s documentary “When the Levees Broke” and the HBO series “Treme.” The first treats the immediate consequences of the 2005 storm; the latter considers its lingering psychological effects.

When I was a senior undergraduate writing my thesis on that fin-de-siècle Catholic fiction writer of eccentric genius, Frederick William Austin Lewis Serafino Mary Rolfe (more commonly known by his self-created moniker, Baron Corvo), I was particularly drawn to the final work of his autobiographical tetralogy: The Desire and Pursuit of the Whole. I liked his ingenious blend of personal narrative, Plato and the quest for integration. It all made sense, though it stood in stark contrast to the ravaged remnants of his own pathos-inducing life.

This year the Shakespeare Theatre Company in Washington, D.C., which for 25 years has given pleasure to some 2.5 million theatergoers, won the Tony Award for regional theater. In holding that honor the company joins two earlier winners: the Oregon Shakespeare Festival in Ashland and the Utah Shakespeare Festival in Cedar City. Shakespeare is much appreciated, read and performed in the United States.

This is a dangerous book. More important, and more frightening, it is an illustrative book, neatly combining a host of ideas about the nature of American exceptionalism that are far from uncommon in Tea Party circles. The book is a window into the mind of the evangelical wing of today’s Republican Party, and it is scary to look through that window.

The battle is over and everyone has won: Dr. Albert C. Barnes, whose storied art collection has found a glorious new home despite his strictures against changing it in any way, much less moving it; the citizens of the Philadelphia suburb of Merion, who will no longer have to contend with busloads of tourists on their narrow streets but will still be able to enjoy the arboretum that the Barnes Foundation will maintain there; art lovers in Philadelphia, and soon from all over the world, who will find access to the collection immensely easier. Above all, the art itself is the winner.

Girolamo Savonarola’s life spanned the latter half of the 15th century, at a time when Italy was simultaneously emerging from the late Middle Ages and launching the transforming cultural, intellectual and spiritual movement that came to be known as the Renaissance. This was a world filled with paradox as great sensitivity and creativity intermixed with widespread violence and power struggles. In the political realm, various republican city-states vied with oligarchic and monarchic polities and increasingly gave way to them.

A few months ago two e-mail messages from former students alerted me that Richard Ford’s new novel was about to appear. We had begun talking about him 25 years ago, when The Sportswriter, the first in his trilogy about Frank Bascombe, appeared. I was teaching at Loyola University New Orleans at the time. Ford was living there, we had met, and he came and talked with my students about writing. Loyola gave him an honorary degree, and he has stayed in my syllabus whenever I taught fiction at one of the five Jesuit universities where I have worked.

One day last fall, an explosion of texts and tweets about police brutality began to appear on the Internet concerning an incident at the Occupy Cal protests on the steps of Sproul Hall at the University of California, Berkeley. Because most college students have camera phones, many captured on video footage of officers beating students, dragging a professor across the lawn by her hair and kneeling on the neck of a student being handcuffed.

The unexpected popularity of "The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel" has made this relaxed comedy a global hit. And not only among Anglophiles, lovers of India or the retirement crowd, though there is much in the film to please each of those groups. Based on Deborah Moggach’s novel “These Foolish Things” and directed by John Madden, the film offers virtually every viewer something to identify with or revel in. It features a wide-ranging set of characters with particular adventures.

In the search for truth and understanding in today’s world there is arguably no more important interaction than that between the natural sciences and religious belief. From academe to journalism, from Beijing to Boston the interplay between these two prominent areas of modern culture rings out with a clarion call to either dialogue or warfare.

Just a decade ago, few observers of the Catholic architectural scene would have predicted a comeback of traditional-looking churches like those currently being constructed in parish communities across the United States. Until then, many architects and design professionals maintained that buildings as rich in historical detailing as those that served the pre-Vatican II church were beyond the means of most Catholic clients.

May 28, 2012 is our liturgy and design issue, and in our culture section Michael E. DeSanctis of Gannon Unversity looks at the trend toward bulding new Catholic churches using elements of traditional design. You can read Professor DeSanctis's article here.

Accompanying the article is a slideshow featuring several churches not mentioned in the article. View the slideshow here.

This book grew out of Tom Roberts’s writing for The National Catholic Reporter over the last two decades and a series of articles still available on its Web site entitled “In Search of the Emerging Church.” The purpose of the book is to show through anecdotes, statistics, interviews and analysis the trends affecting the Catholic Church today. To anyone familiar with NCR, there are few surprises here.

On the morning of Christmas Eve, my wife and I decided to visit a local spiritual destination near our hometown of Worcester, Mass. From our home in a city neighborhood, we cruised past the typical urban fare of bars and pizza shops, fast-food restaurants and pet stores, schools and churches and homes. Within 10 minutes of our departure, though, we were deep into the rural communities that encircle our city, and not long after that we arrived at our destination: St. Joseph’ s Abbey, a Trappist monastery set on a hilltop in Spencer, Mass.

Ross Douthat has written an “on-the-one-hand” and “on-the-other-hand,” learned yet highly readable analysis of the changing role of religion in American politics, culture and history.

Although the moving poem by Emma Lazarus at the foot of the Statue of Liberty envisions “huddled masses yearning to breathe free” at New York harbor, immigration to the United States has historically been more about the push and pull of jobs than about lofty ideals. Indeed, specialists are beginning to tell us that during what some call the Lesser Depression of 2007–9, an actual reduction of immigration, with or without visas, took place, just as happened in the 1930s.

Speaking to the tradition of religious radicalism, Dan McKanan, the Ralph Waldo Emerson Unitarian Universalist Association Senior Lecturer at Harvard Divinity School, offers a history of the relationships be-tween religion and movements for social change in America.

These days when it comes to Baroque art, Caravaggio is all the rage, maybe as fascinating for his transgressive lifestyle—documented in a seemingly endless stream of modern films, books and exhibitions—as for his luminous canvases. Yet for all the bad-boy painter’s fame enjoyed by Caravaggio then and now, no artist enjoyed more esteem in 17th-century Rome, and thus in all of Europe, wielded greater cultural clout or provoked such bitter jealousy and resentment than Gian Lorenzo Bernini.

Extra! Extra! Read all about it! Hollywood Flop Becomes Broadway Sensation!” That headline is what the producers hoped for as Newsies: The Musical arrived in April to “occupy Broadway.”

One of the most jarring moments in the New Testament, repeated in all four Gospels, is the story of Jesus driving out the money-changers from the temple. It is one of the few times we see the Lamb of God genuinely angry, simply outraged at what is going on. Notably, the Bible also tells us how the chief priests and scribes were indignant at Jesus’ cleansing action, stirring a hatred by those in power that eventually led to his crucifixion.

At the end of the 1960s, a Jesuit priest trained in theology decided the time was ripe for the College of the Holy Cross to embrace the spirit of the Second Vatican Council and social change. Propelled by the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr., John Brooks, S.J., took it on himself to integrate what for years had been a shining example of a launching pad for the Irish Catholic aristocracy.

As I hunched over Charles Murray’s latest book, my three-year-old son Augusto pulled a book off his shelf, plopped it on top of Murray’s and said, “Read to me, Papa.” There was Janet Frank’s Daddies, a children’s book first published in 1953. Turning the pages, I realized it captured an America that Murray describes in Coming Apart: The State of White America, 1960-2010. It is an America that Murray says scarcely exists today.

For over 40 years Jeff Dietrich has been a member of the Los Angeles Catholic Worker community, serving meals to the poor of the city’s Skid Row, writing for the community’s appropriately named newspaper, the Catholic Agitator, and doing jail time for various protests and acts of civil disobedience on behalf of justice, peace and the forgotten poor of our inner cities. More than 40 times he has been arrested. Broken and Shared is a powerful collection of essays written over those years.

God Is the Bigger Elvis," airing on HBO April 5, is a recently Academy Award-nominated documentary about former actress Dolores Hart, who left a becoming-major career in Hollywood to become a cloistered nun. Hart, who gave Elvis his first onscreen kiss and costarred with him in two of his pictures, seemingly left “it” all.

Alan Shapiro, author of nine previous collections of poetry, two memoirs, a book of criticism and two classical translations, has published another volume of poems. Night of the Republic is accessible, engaging and playful, and if it does not probe deeply into dark questions, it enables us to see more clearly where those questions might be beneficially raised—namely, in the shops, industries and public venues where American life so often, and often unthinkingly, takes place.

In her writings, Professor Elaine Pagels has popularized Gnostic gospels by crafting stories of spiritually gifted individuals whose insights were rejected by a religious hierarchy adept at wielding political power. Orthodoxy, reinforced by Constantine, eviscerated the spiritually creative impulses in Christianity. Readers taken with her earlier books, Adam, Eve, and the Serpent: Sex and Politics in Early Christianity (1988), and The Origin of Satan (1995), will find this territory familiar.

Michael Ondaatje set his award-winning novel The English Patient against the broad expanse of Italy and Egypt during World War II, but in his newest book, The Cat’s Table, he crafts a much more confined but no less richly imaginative setting, that of a cruise ship sailing from Ceylon to England in 1954. The tale opens with the narrator, who shares with the author the name Michael, recalling how, as an 11- year-old, he left his aunt and uncle for a 21-day ocean voyage to be reunited with his mother, who had left the family home some years previously.

The Great Recession—with its consequent sudden collapse in tax receipts—has inspired a fierce nationwide dispute over the rights and duties of public employees. Gov. Chris Christie of New Jersey has earned a certain folk hero status on YouTube with his verbal confrontations with state workers; Wisconsin’s Gov. Scott Walker successfully pressed an initiative to strip state workers of most collective bargaining rights and now faces a recall election as a result.

Come again? Not that he was dishonorable, mind you, but if one had to summarize the career of Hugh Trevor-Roper (1914-2003) with a single word, adjectives like “witty,” “waspish” or “contrarian” would sooner come to mind than “honourable.” But then Trevor-Roper was also both vigorously old school (a fox-hunting, classically educated elitist) and unremittingly sarcastic (in a typical aside he described two Nazi officials as “a perfect pair, the Tweedledum and Tweedledee of pretentious German silliness”); so one has to take the title with some ironic salt.

2012 is senior year at McKinley High for several members of the Glee Club. Rachel and Kurt are both bent toward the bright lights of Broadway. It will be hard to see them go, but there’s a natural limit to how long adult actors—some of whom will see 30 not long after graduation—can play teenagers. The question is whether they take “Glee” with them.

Critics who attempt to explicate religious themes in literature that does not feature overtly religious content must tread very carefully. A scholar undertaking a theological reading of Milton’s Paradise Lost or Eliot’s Four Quartets walks safely on well-trod ground, but undertaking a similar analysis of the apparently secular novels of John Updike or the films of John Ford can be dangerous. An overly creative interpretation of the texts presents an ever-present risk of distortion. Such a study demands modesty, care and rigor.

In Amy Waldman’s celebrated recent novel The Submission (Farrar, Straus and Giroux), controversy ensues when a Muslim-American named Mohammad Khan is selected to design a memorial at ground zero to victims of the terrorist attacks on Sept. 11, 2001.

One of Khan’s opponents is Sean Gallagher, whose brother, Patrick, was a firefighter killed that awful day.

The first words of the first episode of the first season of Downton Abbey, two years ago, were “Oh, my God,” a locution probably not as common in Edwardian England as it is in Obaman America. In this case, though, the words are perfectly appropriate to the news being received by the North Yorkshire telegraph operator we see at work on April 15, 1912, who has just learned of the sinking of the Titanic.

The Prague Cemetery is a dark and cynical novel filled with detailed historical allusions and personages, as well as the clever wordplay readers have come to expect from Umberto Eco.

After an awful night’s flight from Boston to Madrid, during which dozens of teenagers roamed the airplane aisles joking in Spanish, my wife, Eileen, and I land. We are greeted by a representative of Washington Theological Union, the sponsor of our retreat. Professor Edward McCormack has, for the past 20 years, offered retreats based on the Spiritual Exercises for high school and college students. Like our other retreat leaders, he has been preparing for this journey for a long time.

It was a bright, clear morning in mid-November, and I was rushing to an auditorium at the recently renamed Notre Dame University of Maryland, the former College of Notre Dame of Maryland. I didn’t want to be late for a one-nun show about the life of a nun, the former Caterina Benincasa, better known as Catherine of Siena. I didn’t need to be so worried. There were plenty of seats, it being Saturday morning and all.

In the opening moments of Martin Scorsese’s HBO documentary “George Harrison: Living in a Material World,” there is a brief but important montage. Scorsese uses a shot from a home movie in which the former Beatles’ lead guitarist, as an infant, is being baptized a Catholic; he follows it with a shot of World War II fighter planes flying over Europe. The montage, a revealing contrast of sacred and profane, the holy and the violent, vividly depicts Harrison’s essential quest: how to be spiritual in a material world. The montage also summarizes the distinguished director’s career.

On the highway to happiness, Sidney Callahan may well be thankful she has an intersection called faith to duck into, where she can pause and catch her breath as the traffic roars by.

Summoned to serve on Emory University’s four-year interdisciplinary Pursuit of Happiness Project, Dr. Callahan, a psychologist by training, mother of six and Catholic by choice, bravely takes on the subject of some 43,000 Amazon.com listings and carefully weaves her way through a consideration of our national obsession: happiness.

The Back Chamber is the latest volume of poems by one of America’s most revered poets, Donald Hall, now in his 80s. Above all, this is a volume about transience: about the diminishments of aging, about death and loss.

The life of Caravaggio (1571-1610) is as starkly dramatic and riddled with violence as the paintings he made. Without the art, a film version would resemble Martin Scorsese’s “Mean Streets,” full of compulsive behavior and gang warfare. But drama and violence cannot account for Caravaggio’s artistic status in the Roman art world, where he was widely considered to be the best living painter in Italy. Nor can these account for his monumental reputation today.

Last year was the 25th anniversary of the passing of one of the most outspoken and well-known activists within the Catholic Church during the turbulent 1960s. Corita Kent, once known as Sister Mary Corita, I.H.M., never backed down from her desire to call people to the simplicity of the Gospel through revolutionary art, despite enormous pressure from within and without the church.

In the early evening of Feb. 22, 1998, Larry and Marilyn Martone of Long Island, N.Y., received a phone call from Cook County Hospital telling them that their youngest child, Michelle, an undergraduate senior at the University of Chicago, had been hit by a car. She was on a ventilator and in critical condition with severe brain trauma. “Brain” and “ventilator” were the two words that Marilyn remembers as she, her husband and their sons headed out the door that night to fly to Chicago.

The director Alexander Payne is known for black comedies featuring dazed and confused male protagonists. Think of Matthew Broderick in “Election” or Paul Giamatti and Thomas Haden Church in “Sideways.” Yet he deserves equal recognition for his sensitive adaptations of novels. The Descendants, based on a book of the same name by Kaui Hart Hemmings, is Payne’s fourth film adaptation, and a sign that his reading list is growing in interesting directions.

From the Latin vestimentum and the French vêtement, the word “vestments” means clothing, the kind that covers the body, protects it and sometimes intentionally camouflages what is underneath. It also refers to garments worn by members of the Catholic clergy, “men of the cloth,” at church services.

On January 30, 2012, Kerry Weber published an essay on popular literary pilgrimage sites. Here we offer a slideshow tour of the homes of select Catholic authors.

View the slideshow.

In the summer of 2010, shortly after the Deepwater Horizon well began spewing millions of gallons of oil into the Gulf of Mexico, the environmental writer David Gessner jumped in his car and drove from his North Carolina home down to the gulf to discover for himself the effects of the spill on the local environment, both natural and human. He wanted to experience the story for himself, he explains, “instead of letting the national media take me on its knee, like a kindly uncle, and tell me its sweet and homogenized version of the truth.”

Since 1895, the magnification of the human image and the exaltation of human experience for the purposes of cinema have influenced how people see themselves, define relationships, conduct behavior, kiss, walk, act cool and perceive their place in the universe.

Can comic books and graphic novels tell religious stories in ways that reach young people without diluting the subject? A young Jesuit artist in Krakow, Poland, thinks so. Przemyslaw Wysoglad, S.J., known as Przemo, has combined rich color, clever images and deep reflection in producing his comic paperback Kostka, the story of St. Stanislaus Kostka. The saint, born to an aristocratic Polish family in 1550, attended the Jesuit school in Vienna along with his older brother, Pawel.

One of the greatest books never written was Lord Acton’s “History of Freedom.” He assembled a research library of 60,000 volumes for the project but failed to produce a single page. If Acton had ever written his magnum opus, one hopes that he might have found room for Bernard Délicieux, the delightfully named Franciscan friar who is the hero, albeit a flawed hero, of this book. A native of Montpellier, Délicieux entered the province of Provence of the Friars Minors in 1284.

Michael Morpurgo’s young adult novel “War Horse” is narrated by the title character, Joey, a comely and exuberant half-thoroughbred. In the award-winning play based on the book, puppets are used to represent equines—to striking effect. The challenge facing anyone adapting Morpurgo’s story for the screen is whether and how to capture Joey’s point of view and thus communicate the “inner life” of horses to a plausible and dramatically constructive degree.

In the December 19-26, 2011 issue Judith Dupré explores an inviting new book called Ars Sacra documenting the long Christian tradition of art and architecture. Here she offers a slideshow with commentary of selected images from the book.

Two images permeate Jennifer Haigh’s novel Faith: deep water and light. Both images have enriched human expression since human beings first began telling stories. Both images abound in biblical and classical literature: duc in altum; ex umbra in solem. The deep provokes fear and uncertainty in the human heart, while light implies revelation, understanding and truth.

The Muppets are back and I could not be happier. The new film The Muppets brings us back to the clever humor, zany antics and heartwarming fun of the previous movies and the eponymous television show. This story of friendship, fan-ship and discovering your true talent will delight kids and those who are kids at heart. 

Despite its daunting topic—one woman’s struggle to readjust to life after leaving a cult—audiences may find much to relate to in the new film Martha Marcy May Marlene. In a powerful lead performance, Elizabeth Olsen brings to life the fear, anger, confusion and sorrow of her fractured character. The film, based on director Sean Durkin’s research of former cult members, feels eerily universal as it explores issues of family, belonging and identity.

Christmas is the heart of a child’s calendar. Besides the obvious presents and sweets, there is the deeper attraction: the Nativity story. In Jesus’ birth, children hear themes tremendously empowering for the under-4-foot crowd: the supreme importance of a poor child, that kings and rulers both worshipped and feared a child, and that a young child could change the world. In Christmas, the theological imagination meets the child’s imagination, both suggesting a world in which children matter, and make a difference.

The life of William Carlos Williams would have provided enough material for a full biography even if the man had never put pen to paper. A trusted physician known simply as Doc to generations of patients in Rutherford, N.J., he shared correspondence and friendship with everyone from Ford Madox Ford, Charles Olson and Allen Ginsberg to Man Ray, Denise Levertov and Marcel Duchamp. A publicly devoted family man, he married the sister of his first love and spent the rest of his life betraying her by his philandering.

War has been a constant source of reflection for the followers of Jesus. After centuries of discourse it is not easy to say something new. Yet in this book, Matthew Shadle, an assistant professor of moral theology at Loras College in Dubuque, Iowa, offers a thought-provoking argument for a distinctively Catholic perspective on the origins of war.

Every year, speculation swirls that brand-name authors such as Philip Roth or Amos Oz or Haruki Murakami will finally win the Nobel Prize for Literature. Why is Ireland’s Edna O’Brien, now 80 years old, never included in this elite group?

Long before Charlie Sheen earned $2 million an episode for “Two and a Half Men,” declared himself “winning” and held the American public hostage with his late-night escapades, sitcoms were the shining light of network television. The sitcom has not always been the television equivalent of the crazy old uncle at Christmas, full of excess and awkward moments and, one hoped, forgotten soon afterward.

The producers of the new financial thriller “Margin Call” could not have picked a better time to release their film. In New York and beyond, people are taking to the streets to condemn the actions of financial firms just like the one dramatized by writer/director J.C. Chandor in his debut feature. As picket signs declare “We are the 99 percent,” “Margin Call” peeks behind the curtain on the so-called 1 percent, with a story that explores how selfishness propelled the 2008 credit crisis.

Special talents in writing, combined with a good heart and a life well lived, are needed to write a book on spirituality for a general audience. Robert J. Wicks has brought to the task of writing Streams of Contentment his many fond memories of summers in the Catskills, four decades of professional work as a psychologist (including important contributions in pastoral psychology at Loyola University Maryland) and many joys of being husband, father and friend. Henri J. M.

Have you ever seen St. Francis of Assisi smile? Neither have I. And that’s unfortunate, because according to his biographers, il Poverello (the little poor one) was one of the most joyous of men. He was the merry leader of a band of brethren who called themselves “God’s jugglers,” as they worked and played and sweated and laughed with people in the fields and towns, before ever preaching to them. This sunny disposition also showed itself in the ways Francis located God in some startlingly new places, at least according to the 13th-century worldview.

Catholic bishops have struggled with the impact of declining church attendance, shrinking numbers of priests and the financial costs of settling priest sexual abuse cases. One solution is to close some churches.

The Grace of Everyday Saints is the riveting story of one such church, St. Brigid, in San Francisco. When Archbishop John Quinn shuttered the church in 1994, shocked parishioners banded together to fight the decision—marking the start of a long-running saga that continues to this day.

In all likelihood, Jesus of Nazareth was shorter and darker-skinned than most of us imagine—if, in today’s image-glutted culture, we imagine him at all.

Forty years ago David Knowles, who was a Benedictine monk prior to his appointment as the Regius Professor of Modern History at Cambridge University, wrote a splendid popular survey of Christian monasticism. Elizabeth Rapley, who quotes Knowles with respect, has set a more ambitious goal for herself with this popular history of the religious orders of the Catholic Church. She has succeeded admirably in this informative, judicious and fast-paced narrative that is a pleasure to read.

When I received this book to review, my reaction was, “Terrific. If Gerald O’Collins wrote it, it will be a delight to read.” It is a slim book and I expected to read it in a few hours. Had I paid attention to the subtitle, I might have been less cavalier in my allotment of reading time.

Ray Romano is best known for his performance in the mega-hit sitcom “Everybody Loves Raymond,” but in recent years he has appeared in the modest yet poignant TNT cable network show “Men of a Certain Age,” alongside Scott Bakula and Andre Braugher. I would not be surprised to learn that the best-selling Irish writer Roddy Doyle has seen an episode or two.

During his long and distinguished academic career, Robert Bellah, emeritus professor of sociology at Berkeley, introduced concepts that have shaped the way in which we think of the roles of religion in modern society. His analyses of American civil religion in Varieties of Civil Religion (1970) and The Broken Covenant (1975) and of cultural shifts in social cohesion Habits of the Heart (1985) have become familiar classics.

Angela O’Donnell’s new collection of poems is a lives of the saints—of a sort. Nearly every poem is a tribute to a particular saint, but not all are officially canonized in O’Donnell’s own Catholic tradition. Yes, Teresa of ávila, Thomas Aquinas and St. Francis of Assisi are here. But O’Donnell also boldly proclaims many saints of her own, including the biblical Eve, Emily Dickinson, Seamus Heaney and of course the book’s title saint, Frank Sinatra.

So what was all the fuss about? The question looms large over the decades-old fight over alcohol consumption that culminated with the 13-year era of Prohibition (1920-33). In the hazy light of historical memory, the anti-alcohol movement seems like nothing but a grand mistake, a period whose only redeeming quality is the culture it spawned. The Prohibition era, after all, gave us jazz, flappers and that wonderfully evocative term, “speakeasy.” Not to mention the aphorisms of H. L. Mencken.

A lengthy study of the Victorian poet Christina Rossetti persuaded me to stoop for the first time to yard art. Which is to say, the author of “Goblin Market” and “In the Bleak Midwinter” made me put a statue of St. Jude in my blackberry patch. In truth, I am fundamentally uninterested in nature per se and disdain yard art.

There is a discrepancy between the popular narrative of the American Revolution familiar to most Americans and its academic interpretations. In the popular understanding, a unified group of colonists heroically expelled the foreign British and then quickly agreed on a new plan of self-government that was an instant model for the world. Academic interpretations have stressed how divided the people actually were over the break with Britain and over how to govern themselves afterward.

This book ought to find a place on everybody’s Christmas list this year, both the wish list and the shopping list. It is a book to be received with joy, savored and given. It reaffirms the fundamental mystery of God’s love and redemption that is at the heart of the Christmas mystery of Incarnation.

After nearly a half-century teaching religion, I found myself turning page after page of this fine book, saying—sometimes even aloud—“At last! Someone who really understands!” Thomas Groome realizes that in communication, no matter what the form, the crucial element is not the speaker, nor even the validity of message, but the audience. If the message is ignored, or even scorned, the fault is with the speaker, who has yet to find a method to connect meaningfully with the intended beneficiaries—like selling hockey skates to Bedouins.

Alex Haley’s The Autobiography of Malcolm X, the product of a three-year collaboration, had sold over six million copies worldwide by 1977. The ex-convict, reviled as a messenger of hate and shot down in a hail of 21 bullets, had been brought back to life not as a saint but surely as a martyr—and as one of the great voices of a revolutionary era.

In 2010, at the age of 91, Jerome David Salinger died in Cornish, N.H., where he had lived in seclusion for over 50 years, claiming that he needed isolation to keep his creativity intact. Having acquired fame with the publication of the enormously influential The Catcher in the Rye (1951), he spent the rest of his life avoiding publicity, refusing interviews and thwarting—as best he could—all attempts to publish biographical profiles of him.

In the wake of the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, David Carlson wondered how monks and nuns had responded to the tragedy and if they possessed any special wisdom for the rest of us.

An Orthodox Christian who teaches religion at Franklin College in Indiana, Carlson decided to visit monasteries across the nation. The result is Peace Be With You, an inspiring and timely book published to coincide with the 10-year anniversary of the terrorist attack on the World Trade Center.

The title of this book seems to be debunking its subject, modern poetry. But David Orr, poetry columnist for The New York Times Book Review, is debunking instead the classic arguments for the importance of poetry and admitting, up front, the insignificant status it is accorded today. We are not won to poetry by arguments for it, says Orr, but by being hooked on it. In his own case, a poem called “Water,” by Philip Larkin, did the magic. After all, he points out, “small unnecessary devotions” are what constitute a life. Just notice how people talk about poetry.

With the possible exception of baseball, no sport is more amenable to religious interpretation than golf. As every weekend duffer knows, the game unleashes fierce mental demons. Success appears to stem from a mystical connection between player and course. And while God is no stranger to NFL huddles or NASCAR’s pit row, the best evidence of golf’s theological fecundity may be the high percentage of professional players who are born-again Christians.

This is the true story of Ann Mattingly (1784-1855), a Washington, D.C., socialite who allegedly received a long-distance cure, and a charismatic Austrian priest, Prince Alexander Hohenlohe (1777-1849), an acclaimed miracle worker.

Think of the Great Recession as a Hurricane Katrina brought on not by the weather but by the hand of humankind. It was not inevitable that unemployment would hit a 25-year peak—and stay high for the foreseeable future. The suffering inflicted had to do with the way policymakers managed the economy before it happened.

As Marcus Lyons approached the arched courthouse entrance in March 1991, it was not his naval uniform that drew attention. It was the eight-foot-long wooden cross he shouldered. Curiosity turned to alarm when Lyons attempted self-crucifixion, raising a hammer and pounding a nail into his foot.

This boke is begonne by Goddes gifte and his grace, but it is not yet performed, as to my sight.” Thus Julian of Norwich closes the Long Text of her Revelation of Love, acknowledging the incompleteness of her efforts to probe the profound mystery of God’s love. Similarly, Denys Turner, the Horace Tracy Pitkin Professor of Historical Theology at Yale, writes his commentary Julian of Norwich, Theologian. The simplicity of the title says it all.

I recently enjoyed a barbeque at the Connecticut home of a former student and his wife. The topic of backyard wildlife came up, the most fearsome being the largest snapping turtle they had ever seen, although they assured me that a mountain lion had also been reported in Connecticut. That lead to the topic of guns, and my host reminded me that his grandfather, a former Marine, still sleeps with a handgun under his pillow. “Loaded?” I said.

“Of course. Not much use if it’s not loaded.”

Elizabeth Bishop (1911-79) was a poet laureate (then called “consultant in poetry”) of the United States, a winner of the Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award, and for 17 years a resident of Brazil, which allowed her to keep her distance from the “lit biz” while staying in close touch with The New Yorker and selected literary friends. As a poet and onetime copy editor, I read every word of this book, including all the footnotes describing in detail who made what change in which line in which poem.

Conversion has been a central theme in the writings of the Rev. Charles Curran from the beginning of his career. It is with him still as the backstory of his interpretation of the social mission of the Catholic Church. The theological framework that prevailed before the Second Vatican Council not only distinguished but also separated the supernatural from the natural, the spiritual from the temporal, the hierarchy from the laity, the church from the world and the mission to sanctify from the mission to humanize.

Woody Allen’s latest film, Midnight in Paris, follows the adventures of a successful Hollywood screenwriter named Gil (Owen Wilson), who longs to publish a novel, or anything more serious than the screenplays that have made him rich and famous. Gil is the latest version of the typical “Woody character,” whom Richard A. Blake, S.J., America’s longtime film critic, described in his book Woody Allen: Profane and Sacred as one who “stutters and stumbles...through life, insecure, threatened, and desperately unhappy.”

If you ever get the opportunity to spend some time in a religious order’s novitiate I would highly recommend it. A novitiate is, of course, the place where budding, hopeful religious men and women learn the ins and outs of daily living of their particular order—Jesuit, Dominican, Franciscan, etc. You also spend a lot of time with the same handful of people; frequently a lot of navel gazing occurs, but more importantly, like it or not, you learn to become a member of a community. 

Show, don’t explain,” an editor suggested to me. Premature explaining closes off participation; showing invites it. Harvey Egan, S.J., a professor of systematic and mystical theology at Boston College, wagers that a broad showing of mystical writers will surface the titans, central themes and neglected writers of the mystical way.

Inspired by Teilhard de Chardin’s vision, Louis M. Savary, a well-known spiritual writer and former Jesuit, suggests a provocative new approach to the Spiritual Exercises of St. Ignatius—changing the focus from a concern “for individual salvation and getting to heaven” to a communal project of working interdependently with one another on the Christ Project.

I was thinking about G. K. Chesterton while sitting in the Public Theater in New York the other day, watching Tony Kushner’s new three-and-a-half hour play.

Pulitzer prize-winner Joseph Lelyveld has written an insightful book on the “father of ahimsa or non-violence,” whose smiling face appears on every Indian currency bill and whose name marks countless streets, universities, institutes and centers in the land of his birth. Called the Father of the Nation, or Bapuji, Mahatma Gandhi’s birth anniversary (Oct. 2) is a public holiday, when the country bows in a national show of praise and remembrance of the person who was largely responsible for India’s gaining independence from British rule on Aug. 15, 1947.

Whatever fed Alice Neel’s ferocious determination to become an artist cannot be explained by the facts of her long, hard and complex life. Those facts are full of ironies and contradictions. How did a woman prone to breakdowns in young adulthood weather decades of penury, family instability and artistic obscurity—plus abandonment by her spouse and episodes of violence by a longtime lover?

Dilemmas and Connections is a collection of 16 essays by the Canadian philosopher Charles Taylor. Most have been or are about to be published in various places, and four appear for the first time. The topics treated range from the poetry of Paul Celan to the meaning of nationalism, from human rights to “Catholic modernity.” The issues are treated with the breadth of scholarship and insight that are typical of Taylor’s long career as one of the most significant contemporary philosophers.

When I first visited it, the Cathedral of Notre Dame was bathed in sunset. It was the festival of St. Michel during the summer of 1978, and symphony orchestras played under massive tents throughout the plazas of Paris. A Jesuit friend, Joe Devlin, and I walked through the city dumbstruck.

On Sept. 12, 1918, the “bottom dropped out” of Eleanor Roosevelt’s world. She had just discovered a stack of love letters from Lucy Mercer tucked in the luggage of Franklin Delano Roosevelt, her husband of 14 years. Eleanor offered Franklin a divorce, asking him, however, to consider the effects on their five children and insisting he never see Mercer again. Meanwhile, his mother, Sara Roosevelt, threatened disinheritance and his political advisor, Louis Howe, warned of the end of a promising political career.

In an early scene in Roland Joffé’s newest film, “There Be Dragons,” the camera offers the audience an unusual point of view. A shot, angled upward, encompasses a room in which two boys sit in chairs, side by side. In the foreground, a pair of glasses rests on a table, and each lens frames one of the boys.

I have often thought of the theater as my church, and not only in periods when my actual church attendance has been spotty for one reason or another, including sleeping in from late nights after the theater. Indeed, analogies between theatergoing and churchgoing are easy to make: the audience as congregation, the liturgy as a kind of script, the priest as performer.

When the Nobel Prize-winning novelist José Saramago died last June at the age of 87, he left his readers a farewell gift in the form of a captivating novel, The Elephant’s Journey. This modest but emotionally quite moving tale unfolds as Saramago wistfully re-imagines a historical event of 1551, when King John III of Portugal presented to Archduke Maximilian of Austria an Indian elephant as a belated wedding gift.

When I mentioned to a Belgian Jesuit theologian visiting me during Holy Week that I intended to write a review of the PBS series, “Forgiveness: A Time to Love and a Time to Hate,” he issued a stern warning: “Don’t be like so many religious voices who urge reconciliation at the drop of a hat, often enough before they have even acknowledged any real and painful conflict!” 

One of the abiding mysteries in the Book of Psalms, a work that James Kugel, Starr Professor of Hebrew Literature emeritus at Harvard, has studied probably as fruitfully as any living person, is the sudden pivot in many of the so-called Psalms of Lamentation (or Complaints). Four-fifths of the way through, songs intensely devoted to bemoaning their authors’ dire straits abruptly shrug off their sackcloth and seem to proclaim, “Despite the fact that my bones are melting and my heart failing, I assert my faith in You.”

If you made us for yourself

Millions of readers are familiar with the oeuvre of Joyce Carol Oates, who has written well over 100 books of fiction, short stories, plays and poetry and is the recipient of numerous literary awards.

In A Widow’s Story Oates describes in wrenching detail her excruciating grief after the death of her husband, Raymond Smith, following a short illness three years ago. She is overcome by a “kind of visceral terror” and sinks into depression, loses weight, endures sleepless nights and blames herself for not taking better care of her husband.

Back in the 1960s, there was almost universal acceptance among social scientists of the “secularization thesis,” the belief that as societies became more modern—more economically developed, technologically sophisticated, democratic, etc.—they would become increasingly secular, to the point that religious belief would virtually disappear.

The head and upper chest of the figure emerging from the dark background seem at first to face us squarely. With its broad peasant's nose and slightly parted, full lips, the face would not be remarkable but for the searching eyes and their haunting expression. Gradually one notices, thanks to the light and subtle modulation of the flesh, that the head and shoulders turn somewhat to their left. Resting lightly on the figure's head, and casting a shadow, is the strangely delicate circlet of a thorny branch.

"

As the people of Japan, Christchurch and Haiti slowly rebuild their lives after suffering the devastating effects of earthquakes, a detail unique to Matthew’s account of the empty tomb catches one’s attention. The placid daybreak is shattered with “a great earthquake” (28:2), echoing the description of the aftermath of the death of Jesus found only in Matthew. Just after Jesus utters his final words and breathes his last, Matthew says, “The earth shook, and the rocks were split. The tombs also were opened, and many bodies of the saints who had fallen asleep were raised.

To begin a book on the history of Broadway musical theater with Stephen Sondheim could hardly be construed as novel or surprising. After all, Sondheim is arguably the finest living composer and lyricist of this captivating category of theater. Being a fervent fan of the genre in general and of Sondheim in particular, I was glad Larry Stempel begins his history with this master, who turned 80 last year.

During the first year after Theodore Roosevelt left the White House, he hunted lions, ate elephant hearts, read dozens of pocket-size books especially packed for his safari, produced 11 installments of his adventures for Scribner’s and generally spent those months “daily risking death in Africa.” Before embarking upon his journey home in June of 1910, this “most famous man in the world” traveled and orated his way through Naples, Rome, Vienna, Budapest and Paris, with side trips to Belgium, the Netherlands, Denmark, Norway, Sweden and Germany.

Over the last few years HBO has treated viewers to epic miniseries on epic subjects. In “John Adams” the subject was the Revolutionary War and the growing pains of a fledgling nation. “The Pacific” examined the sprawling Allied campaign against Japan during World War II. This year brings us Mildred Pierce, a no-less-lengthy project (five parts aired over four nights beginning March 27) but with a more modest focus: the eponymous 1941 novel by James M. Cain.

Robert F. Drinan, S.J., was elected to Congress in 1970 on his promise to be a “moral architect,” and in many ways he was. He steadfastly opposed the war in Vietnam, dared to be the first member of Congress to call for President Richard M. Nixon’s impeachment and devoted himself to the cause of human rights in politically repressive countries like Argentina.

Sasas

The Adjustment Bureau” is one of the most explicitly theological films of the last 25 years. Unfortunately, it proposes an extraordinarily bad theology.

The movie, based on a short story by Philip K. Dick, tells the story of David Morris (played convincingly by Matt Damon), an up-and-coming American politician. After Morris loses a Senate election, he meets Elise (Emily Blunt), a woman for whom he feels an immediate attraction. She gives him her phone number, and David, after his electoral defeat, is eager to pursue this new relationship.

Barry Hannah’s posthumous anthology comes garlanded with praise most fiction writers would not dare to imagine: tributes gathered throughout his fertile, tormented (by alcohol and other demons) career, from the likes of William Styron (“an original”), Philip Roth (“fierce and pitiless southern comedy”), Thomas McGuane (“a voice so original and enduring”), Cynthia Ozick (“explosive”), Richard Ford (“incomparably fresh”) and John Grisham (“just fearless”). Newcomers to Hannah (d.

In the short story “Silence,” from Colm Tóibín’s acclaimed recent collection The Empty Family, the Irish writer Lady Gregory is depicted as observant and yearning, a dutiful wife striving to be more than simply some “dowager from Ireland.” And yet, in Joseph O’Connor’s latest novel, Ghost Light, the same woman seems almost pushy, as she chastises J. M. Synge because of the doomed playwright’s love affair with the young actress Maire O’Neill (born Molly Allgood).

One of the most attractive and productive approaches in biblical studies in recent years goes by the German term Wirkungsgeschichte, that is, the history of the Bible’s influence or effects. The books covered in this survey illustrate in various ways the influence of the Bible and its interpretation throughout the centuries and today.

A core belief of the Tea Party is that contemporary politics should be viewed through the lens of the American founding. Jill Lepore’s new book looks at the Tea Party itself through the lens of that belief, and the resulting picture is not a pretty one. Lepore teaches history at Harvard, and she writes for The New Yorker, so she epitomizes the “liberal cultural elite” the Tea Partyers decry. This book is a kind of payback, unleashing her wealth of learning and her stylish prose on the Tea Party’s self-identity.

Television has become a wasteland of crime labs, police stations and courtrooms. Every title is an initialism, followed by a colon and a major U.S. city name, apparently the only way viewers can discern which crime series they are watching. From “C.S.I.” to “N.C.I.S.,” each blends into the next, an hourlong blur of DNA samples and police interrogations.

This book is written in what the Catholic Biblical Quarterly calls haute vulgarisation, which is to say that it requires solid scholarship but is written in a way that the general, educated readership can follow and appreciate it. In this case there is a breadth and depth of personal experience accompanying the scholarship. Rabbi James Rudin is a leading figure in Jewish-Christian relations nationally and internationally.

If the exhibition of the most brilliant valor, of the excess of courage, and of a daring which would have reflected luster on the best days of chivalry can afford full consolation for the disaster of today, we can have no reason to regret the melancholy loss which we sustained in a contest with a savage and barbarian enemy."

—The London Times Nov. 13, 1854

 

Arguably America’s greatest living poet, Richard Wilbur is, beyond doubt, our most skilled contemporary practitioner of traditional forms. A two-time Pulitzer Prize-winner and a former poetry consultant to the Library of Congress, he has had a long and auspicious career, publishing his first volume of poetry at age 26 and his most recent at 89.

During a recent discussion with a brother Jesuit about the inherent goodness or badness (I believe the terms ‘Luddite’ and ‘Borg’ were trotted out during the conversation) of smart phones, I asserted that there were plenty of Catholic-centric uses for such devices. In the great Jesuit fashion, my confrere asked me to prove it. So I began combing through Apple’s App Store in order to find the best Catholic apps I could. 

This unusually interesting book delivers on the promise of its subtitle. It tells the truly epic story of labor in America from the early 19th-century textile workers in the nation’s first industrial city, Lowell, Mass., to the November 1999 protests when the World Trade Organization met in Seattle.

The Rite” fails both as a horror film and as a religious experience. But it didn’t have to happen that way. I read Matt Baglio book’s The Rite: The Making of a Modern Exorcist (2009), on which the new film is loosely based, and talked to priests in California who knew the Rev. Gary Thomas, the priest who inspired the book and who served as technical adviser for the film. They spoke well of him.

Michael Gallagher, S.J., a professor of fundamental theology at Rome’s Gregorian University, has written a gem of a book. In clear prose, laced with more than a touch of poetry, he presents the writings of 10 prominent thinkers who explore the substance and challenge of Christian faith.

Anyone who’s ever endured the indignity of job loss and the corresponding loss of self-worth—not to mention a soul-destroying series of dispiriting job interviews and the patronizing attitude of friends, relatives and still-employed former co-workers—will find that “The Company Men” strikes a queasily familiar chord. If ever there was a film reflective of our economically depressed times, this is it.

One summer many years ago my mother took me, at age 11, to Mexico City from Los Angeles to meet my Mexican relatives for the first time. This was quite a shock: discovering an alternative world. Ever since then I have been trying to assimilate how such diverse universes can co-exist. So this is the book that I have always wanted to write myself, but this gringo Ron Austin, a senior Hollywood writer and producer of “Mission: Impossible,” “Matlock” and “Charlie’s Angels,” has beat me to it.

Television has become a wasteland of crime labs, police stations and court rooms. Every title is an acronym, usually with a colon and a major U.S. city name following it, this seemingly being the only way to discern which particular crime scene series you are watching. From “CSI” to “NCIS,” each blends into the next one until they all become one hour long blur of DNA samples and police interrogations. But this too shall pass.

Inside Job,” the film by Charles Ferguson, about the economic meltdown of 2008, richly deserves an Oscar nomination, if not a win, for Best Documentary. What the film deserves most, however, is to be seen. The main point of the film—that the Great Recession was avoidable—should be seared onto the consciousness of the American public.

For those who did not get the metaphor they wanted for Christmas, we offer Rooster Cogburn’s eyepatch. The gunslinging hero of True Grit—the character who in 1970 won John Wayne a depressingly predictable Oscar—did not wear one in the Charles Portis novel. But Wayne did. In remaking a film that is most notable now as a symbol of Old Hollywood’s last roundup and the mortified sensibilities of a film industry being cattle-prodded into the future, the Coen brothers have preserved the one device that gave their predecessor any wit at all.

Is “Black Swan” a ballet film? Though dancers occupy almost every frame of the movie, the description seems inappropriate. Ballet summons images of ineffable grace—the straight line of a leg, a seamless pirouette—yet “Black Swan” is devoid of that sublime spirit. Instead we witness a very different kind of pursuit: the drive to perfection, and the demons that inevitably arise as a result.

Salman Rushdie has two sons, Zafar and Milan, born so far apart (1980, 1998) that each might as well be an only child. And to each of them he has dedicated a lyrical fantasy about a hapless story-telling father rescued by an omnicompetent young son. Rushdie reportedly wrote his first such tale, Haroun and the Sea of Stories (1990), in response to Jafar’s request for a novel that children like him could read. Nobody knows whether Milan made the same request; but in either case, Papa did not quite deliver.

Christmas is the high holiday of the child year. It was especially so for me growing up in Bethlehem, Pa., which was founded on Christmas Eve 1740. Christmas loomed large in the Christmas City. The giant star of Bethlehem shining on South Mountain even eclipsed the smokestacks of the Bethlehem Steel plants. But a high point for our family was always the exquisite music at our parish church, Notre Dame of Bethlehem, and the violin and trumpet of our friends, the Bosch family. The Bosches were immigrants from Germany. Every Christmas Mrs.

King George VI—affectionately known as Bertie and father of the present-day Queen Elizabeth II—had a stammer so pronounced that public speaking was for him pure, unadulterated agony.

Commenting on the Roman Inquisition’s prosecution of Galileo (1633), Dava Sobel, the celebrated author of Galileo’s Daughter, writes that “no other process in the annals of canon or common law has ricocheted through history with more meanings, more consequences, more conjecture, more regrets.” A similar mélange of interpretations also muddles attempts to arrive at an accurate portrait of the man Galileo Galilei himself (1564-1642). David Wootton’s well-researched biography Galileo: Watcher of the Skies hardly clears things up, but it does make for fascinating reading.

Just as the 2010 football season moves into full swing, Broadway salutes a gridiron legend with an entertaining 90-minute drama called Lombardi. But since a theatrical presentation of an iconic figure can go in all sorts of directions, it is worth asking, as those Blackglama fur ads asked a few decades back, What becomes a legend most? The portrayal could be dark and disturbing, like the depiction of the artist Mark Rothko in “Red,” which won last season’s Tony Award for Best Drama.

During the height of the crisis provoked in 2002 and 2003 by the sexual abuse of young people by members of the Catholic clergy in the United States, John McGreevy, the respected Notre Dame historian, called it “the single most important event in American Catholicism since the Second Vatican Council” and “the worst crisis in the history of the American Church.” At the time, at least one high-ranking Roman curial official arrogantly dismissed the crisis as largely a problem confined to the United States and the English-speaking world.

The popular work of Latin America’s most celebrated living artist, Fernando Botero, is instantly recognizable. His smooth, corpulent forms in paintings, sculptures, drawings and prints have been exhibited around the world. Two of Botero’s monumental bronze nudes decorate the entrance hall of the Time-Warner Center in New York City, and a multi-ton cat of his prowls outside an apartment building further uptown. Several major museums have purchased his works for their permanent collections, and his paintings of circus life were displayed in Venice and in Zurich during summer.

It is impossible to be a Catholic in the Western world without knowing the art of Spanish artist Salvador Dalí (1904-1989). Walk into any Catholic institution—school, rectory, convent or chancery—and you are likely to find a reproduction of one of his religious paintings, like the “Christ of St.

This fascinating and frustrating memoir by one of the great modern statesmen is full of good things. But there is a great gap in it. “I had always been fortunate,” says Britain’s former prime minister (1997–2007), a Catholic convert and the founder of the Tony Blair Faith Foundation, “in having a passion bigger than politics, which is religion.” He says this on p. 663, just before the postscript, having mentioned his faith almost not at all.

Let’s get right to the point. Yes, the scene is brutal. It lasts only a few minutes but the cringe quotient is almost unbearably high. But don’t let it deter you from seeing the film. You’ll be surprised how chipper you feel on the way out.

If you have ever wondered what the great city of Xanadu in Northern China looked like when Marco Polo arrived there around 1275, you can get a good idea by visiting New York City’s Metropolitan Museum of Art, where “The World of Khubilai Khan: Chinese Art in the Yuan Dynasty” will be dazzling today’s travelers for the next several months.

In the early 1960s, Dorothy Day started sending her papers to the archives of Marquette University, where they remained sealed until a quarter century after her death in 1980. Two years ago, Marquette University Press published The Duty of Delight: The Diaries of Dorothy Day, edited by Robert Ellsberg. The Selected Letters form a companion volume. We are indebted to Ellsberg for completing this monumental, two-part project.

Writers of saints’ lives must steer a careful course. Today’s readers generally bring a skeptical perspective to accounts of miracles, and they expect careful historical research to ground the narrative. At the same time, they expect, even hope for, some clear indication of exactly what makes this person a saint; they look for the numinous, tucked into the corners of historical reality. In Catherine of Siena: A Passionate Life, Don Brophy steers the course well.

I look forward to the publication of a new Mark Massa title with roughly the same level of excitement with which my daughter anticipates the release of the next Harry Potter movie. I exaggerate only slightly. Massa’s two previous books—one a study of Catholicism and American culture in the 1950s and the other a history of anti-Catholicism in the United States—changed the way I think and teach about those subjects and turned me into an admirer of the author’s keen wit and thoughtful prose. Massa’s latest book, The American Catholic Revolution, met my expectations and more.

Hereafter” is not a signature Clint Eastwood film. The octogenarian director is far from his males-under-fire comfort zone in this doleful supernatural drama. An iconic agent of death as a performer, Eastwood now ponders its literal meaning from behind the camera.

The key to enjoying The Social Network, the big-screen version of the founding of the Web site Facebook, is to acknowledge that at its core the film is not about the founding of Facebook.

Michael Cunningham delights in writing about New York City. His Pulitzer-prize winning novel, The Hours (1998), culminates in New York, just south of Washington Square Park at the bottom of a dark and foul airshaft between two apartment buildings. His last novel, Specimen Days (2005), is comprised of three novellas set in New York of the past, present and future.

Half a century has passed since the end of the literary era generally recognized by scholars and readers alike as the golden age of Catholic authors in the English-speaking world. The decades leading up to the Second Vatican Council produced so many prodigious talents recognized as “Catholic authors” that it is not uncommon to wax nostalgic for the writers of that time; their names and works are often what come to mind when one thinks of the roughly-defined genre of Catholic literature. In the United States alone, the two-year period preceding Vatican II saw J. F.

In autumn hope springs eternal, and usually lasts about a week. Then the Nielsen ratings come in. In network television that is when executives can garner a sense of whether the new shows they have spent the previous six months primping and priming will see the light of the May sweeps. Industry types spend July and August buzzing over which shows will hit and which will miss, as pilots are bandied about and advertising executives decide where to put their money.

For this reviewer, the most memorable intersection of motion pictures and Catholicism involves Fordham Road and University Avenue in the Bronx, circa 1961. Across those streets, the lovely Sister Laureen herded a class of unruly uniformed first-graders to see the Twentieth Century Fox epic “Francis of Assisi.” As a movie, and a moral lesson, it left almost no impression other than the memory of a miraculous morning free of school.

The series titled “Called to Holiness: Spirituality for Catholic Women,” from St. Anthony Messenger Press, is an adventurous treatment of the spiritual life. The theologian Elizabeth A. Dreyer is general editor of the eight-volume paperback series. The books are not based on an unexamined notion that women are somehow “more spiritual.” Instead, the series takes a broad, theologically grounded view that women are well suited to do theology and spirituality through study, reflection, biblical formation, prayerfulness and worship, depth of experience and a sharp sense of social conscience.

Although the Dreyfus Affair may be unfamiliar to some Americans, it was a vital moment in French history, and its significance for modern Catholicism cannot be overstated. The court-martial in 1894-95 of Colonel Alfred Dreyfus, a Jewish army officer, and his imprisonment on Devil’s Island inaugurated an era of intensified Catholic-Republican strife. Rage against Dreyfus’s wrongful conviction and right-wing anti-Semitism would lead to political victories for a unified left.

Great actors disappear into their roles. Sarah Bernhardt seemed to reverse the process, at least according to George Bernard Shaw, who judged her acting “childishly egotistical.” In his opinion, she subsumed her characters and made them into reproductions of herself. Audiences related to Bernhardt, not Cleopatra or Camille or Athalie. So great was this hypnotic force that she conquered audiences around the world, even though she performed only in French. Her captivated fans, at least outside France, could dispense with the poetry of the lines or the dramatic action.

A novel about goodness has become an uncommon event in contemporary America. Novels about faith are plentiful, and some readers may prefer to think of Bo Caldwell’s second effort—following The Distant Land of My Father, a bestseller—as a book about faith. A young man and woman, Mennonites, meet when they are recruited as missionaries to China. It is 1906.

Like someone sampling hot bath water, Ian Frazier eases himself into making the full commitment that writing a book about Siberia would demand. First, he dips his toe into the vast subject by reading a few Siberian travel adventures. Then he takes two short trips to Siberia, one to Provideniya on the Chukotka Peninsula and the other to the Diomede Islands in the Bering Strait.

In 1929, shortly before he was to leave Germany to become cardinal secretary of state, the then papal nuncio and future pontiff, Eugenio Pacelli, expressed his apprehension about Hitler: “This man is completely obsessed,” he said. “All that is not of use to him, he destroys; all that he says and writes carries the mark of his egocentricity; this man is capable of trampling on corpses and eliminating all that obstructs him.” Four years later, when Hitler became chancellor, Pacelli’s prophecy was fulfilled.

The proximity of religious difference in our globalized world raises new tasks for Christians. As our workplaces, schools and communities are increasingly multireligious, it’s a good idea to have some understanding of the faiths our neighbors profess. But as this volume suggests, our interreligious milieu provides a new impetus not just for learning about our neighbors’ faiths but learning from them. Francis X. Clooney, S.J., is a most trustworthy guide.

This is the fourth book from the Emerging Models of Pastoral Leadership Project. The project has three goals: provide solid research on parish pastoral leadership, stimulate conversation about the use of pastoral imagination to create vibrant parishes and explore ways in which national associations can collaborate to serve the church. The co-authors of this study, Dean R. Hoge and Marti R. Jewell, contribute significantly to fulfilling the first two goals, bringing scholarship and expertise to the task.

We are in the snow-covered woods by a frozen lake in Sweden. The camera leads us through the window into a cabin where Ed (George Clooney) and a beautiful woman lie in bed. The sun rises and Ed steps out into a world of white under a brilliant sun. But something is wrong. Zing! A bullet smashes into a rock a few inches from his head. His girlfriend runs out. They crouch as the bullets fly in. Ed pulls out his gun. “You have a gun?” The girl is surprised. There are two attackers and (spoiler alert) Ed kills them both. “Go in and call the police,” he says to the girl.

Political journalism often buries itself in unimportant minutiae. Historians often lose sight of the lived circumstances and daily challenges of the politicians they survey, placing them in sweeping historical narratives that would have made little sense to the actors themselves. Both genres suffer from the same projection of the needs of the author into the subject matter, the journalist sacrificing perspective to break her story, the historian sacrificing the historical record to justify his theories.

The Budapest-born British author and political activist Arthur Koestler was a man of controversy in death as in life. Hands trembling with Parkinson’s disease and diagnosed with chronic lymphocytic leukemia, he nonetheless continued to write, albeit with great difficulty, until a swelling in the groin indicated a metastasis of the cancer. And so in 1983, at his home in London, he, at age 77, together with his third wife, Cynthia Jefferies, age 55, killed themselves with an overdose of barbiturates and alcohol.

Her profile to the audience, Charlyne Yi begins to sing a ballad about her recent breakup. In the blink of an eye she turns one hundred and eighty degrees to reveal her counter profile, now dressed as the lamented boyfriend; Yi is, quite literally, split down the middle. It was then, as she offered his side of the story in a unique one-person duet, that I realized that I wasn’t in Kansas anymore, or New York for that matter, and most certainly not Hollywood. I was at the Fringe. 

It happens in all corners of human life. A practice or endeavor starts up, gains momentum and evolves into an unquestioned feature of the social landscape. This familiar process of routinization displays certain advantages. It allows society to turn its attention to more pressing business, under the assumption that if settled institutions are not broken, they require no fixing. The problem is that self-regulation is rarely sustainable. Taking anything for granted for too long invites corruption and corrosion.