In ‘Metropolitans: New York Baseball, Class Struggle, and the People’s Team,’ A. M. Gittlitz fuses his interest in leftist sociopolitics with his love of baseball, or, rather, his very specific love of the Mets.
History
Posted inBooks
Review: Thomas More, God’s good servant
Joanne Paul wrote her powerful and considerable biography of Thomas More because she finds More’s life relevant to today’s world. But the book also addresses another question: Was More a saintly martyr or a vicious murderer?
Posted inBooks
Review: Molly McNett and making the unsayable sayable
Molly McNett’s ‘Child of These Tears’ displays the difficulties of translation, the irreducibility of meaning, and the frustrating limitations of human nature and society.
Posted inBooks
Review: Bennett Cerf, Random House co-founder and superstar editor
Gayle Feldman’s new biography of Bennett Cerf, ‘Nothing Random,’ is a window into the past of American literary culture.
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Sheed & Ward: the unlikely power couple who revolutionized Catholic publishing
As readers mark the centennial of the Sheed & Ward publishing house, we celebrate what “the Sheedwardians”—as that unlikely Catholic power couple sometimes called themselves—meant back in their heyday.
Posted inFilm
‘Miracle’ is a worthwhile trip down memory lane—even if you don’t remember the 1980 Olympics.
“Miracle: The Boys of ‘80” aptly balances archival footage and contemporary reactions, offering an exciting sports documentary while also pulling on the heartstrings with its nostalgic tone.
Posted inPodcasts
The Black Masking Indians of Mardi Gras
This week, on a special Mardi Gras episode, “Jesuitical,” Ashley and Sebastian speak with Dr. Ansel Augustine about the harrowing and sacred culture of the Black Masking Indians of Mardi Gras.
Posted inBooks
Review: How the suburbs changed the church
Focusing on Long Island, in New York, Stephen Koeth’s ‘Crabgrass Catholicism’ traces the institutional adjustments that occurred as once-urban Catholic families took up suburban living after World War II.
Posted inCatholic Book Club
The legend of ‘The Pope’s Gorilla’: Archbishop Paul Marcinkus
By the late 1970s, Archbishop Paul Marcinkus was considered one of the most powerful figures in the Vatican—and certainly one of its most controversial.
Posted inArts & Culture, Books
Review: The ‘Scopes Monkey Trial’ and church-state tensions
Brenda Wineapple’s ‘Keeping the Faith: God, Democracy, and the Trial That Riveted a Nation’—about the famous Scopes “monkey trial,” is timely. Then again, church-state conflicts simply never go away in the United States.