Resources
-
In the midst of Ernest Hemingway’s novel, The Sun Also Rises, a successful novelist, Bill Gorton, demands that his friend, Jake Barnes—the novel’s narrator—give him “irony and pity” one morning in a friendly repartee. Jake Barnes has been trying to write fiction, and Bill Gorton is razzing him: “Give me irony and pity, irony and pity.” If you want to be a writer, you must be able to generate irony and pity abundantly and with alacrity. Finally, toward the end of the exchange, Bill...
-
In the epilogue of The Pope’s Last Crusade: How an American Jesuit Helped Pope Pius XI's Campaign to Stop Hitler, Peter Eisner offers an interesting insight on the men who held the seat of Peter during the 20th century. Of the seven pontiffs that were elected during that time, six are either...
-
In March the newly relaunched Catholic Book Club will discuss The Patriarch: The Remarkable Life and Turbulent Times of Joseph P. Kennedy. The conversation will be lead by Kevin Spinale, S.J., a Jesuit scholastic who teaches English at Boston College.
Read Kevin's introduction to the new Catholic Book Club and David Nasaw's book on Joseph P. Kennedy.
-
November 19, 2012
Life will break your heart. So will Jonathan Kozol’s Fire in the Ashes. It is full of life—messy, disorganized, broken and tragic, and yes, sometimes still full of joy and mercy and grace at unexpected moments. This latest account of the lives of the other Americans who peopled Kozol’s previous explorations of poverty and personal and institutional dysfunction brings his readers up to date on the children chronicled in Rachel and Her Children and Amazing...
-
October 22, 2012
A convert from Islam to Roman Catholicism, Lamin Sanneh possesses an in-depth knowledge of two of the world’s most talked-about religions. In an age in which individuals and churches too-often reject interfaith dialogue in favor of hate speech, protests or violence, Sanneh’s voice is a welcome one, respectful of all faiths and infused with refreshing honesty. As the D.
-
July 16, 2012
When historians write the history of the development of our political ideas and institutions this past quarter century, they would be amply justified to label it “an unexpected revolution.” For beginning in the early 1990s, there has been a proliferation of new practices and institutions, even professions: humanitarian interventions, the responsibility to protect, truth and reconciliation commissions, international war tribunals and the international criminal court, to name the most obvious...
-
June 4, 2012
As a columnist for the Washington Post, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, and the author of several books, including Why Americans Hate Politics, E.J. Dionne Jr. keeps his finger on the nation’s pulse. Across the political spectrum many Americans fear that our nation, not just the economy, is in decline; that political polarization is keeping us from governing ourselves effectively; and that growing inequality may persist because the old social contract based on shared...
-
April 16, 2012
Marilynne Robinson is best known for her first two novels, Housekeeping and Gilead, which appeared 20 years apart. Reviews of Gilead (2004) were rapturous, yet readers sometimes wondered: what took so long? Robinson’s latest collection of essays, When I Was a Child I Read Books, offers a satisfying answer. The book reveals an agile mind formed by decades of deep reading. A committed Christian and American, Robinson calls upon believers and citizens...
-
March 19, 2012
As the celebration of the 50th anniversary of the Second Vatican Council unfolds over the next four years, the struggle over its legacy and meaning will intensify. It is a struggle that began almost as soon as the Council concluded in December, 1965. In Vatican II: The Battle for Meaning, Massimo Faggioli traces the multiple debates that constitute that struggle.
-
February 27, 2012
Nefas, literally “unspeakable,” is a Latin word for evil. It is a heavy word, weightier than malum, the term for a garden-variety moral wrongdoing. It is an offense against the sacred, sacrilege, in the sense of a ritual violation, but even more in the sense of a violation of the divine, an offense against Goodness Itself. It was in this sense that Thomas Merton wrote in Raids on the Unspeakable of the crimes of the national security state.