When Michael Dirda took this summer off discerning readers of The Washington Post Book World were most likely disappointed They enjoy Dirda rsquo s erudite yet accessible reviews each Sunday The range of Dirda rsquo s interests and the breadth and depth of his literary knowledge are quite impress

Karen Armstrong rsquo s latest book covers arguably the most ambitious topic that she has yet attempted The scope is vast covering multiple continents cultures and chronologies Hundreds of years dozens of major figures and a landscape that stretches from Mount Olympus to the Great Wall of China

Charles D rsquo Ambrosio says that as a young man he turned to fiction in part as a Daedalian act of snobbery against aspects of his Jesuit education In an essay on J D Salinger published in 2001 D rsquo Ambrosio recounts how during his time at Seattle Prep reading Joyce and other modern write

Talk about heroic labors To flesh out the tale of his quirky Irish-American theologian Fr Eddie Danaher George McCauley a New York Jesuit invents major chunks of history an imaginary religious order the Christian Fathers founded in the 16th century by a swashbuckling Portuguese explorer-tur

The North Atlantic captivity of the church is drawing to an end The center of Christian gravity is undeniably shifting southward This development is not a blip on the religious radar screen but a profound permutation Globally a major gravitational adjustment is occurring in the population density

Alan Wolfe director of the Boisi Center for Religion and American Public Life at Boston College has written a sharp indictment of the Bush administration and the conservatives who support it Wolfe rsquo s overall interpretive point in Does American Democracy Still Work is that conservatives wh