Octavia Butler, the Black science fiction writer who died in 2006, did not just create imaginary worlds with parallels to ours. Sometimes she created worlds that are eerily a little too much like our own.
James T. Keane
James T. Keane is a Senior Editor at America.
Posted inLast Take, Politics & Society
Remembering Fay Vincent: MLB commissioner, baseball purist and friend of the Jesuits
It was with heavy hearts that we at ‘America’ learned of the death of Fay Vincent Jr. in Vero Beach, Fla., on Saturday at the age of 86.
Posted inArts & Culture, Catholic Book Club
Michael Longley’s poetry perfectly blends Irish political and pastoral themes
Michael Longley, the Irish poet whose long career included more than 40 books, died last week. He was lauded by literary, social and political figures alike for his many contributions to Irish literature and to the cause of social reconciliation.
Posted inFaith, Scripture Reflections
St. Paul’s reminders of humility
A Reflection for the Feast of the Conversion of St. Paul, Apostle, by James T. Keane
Posted inArts & Culture, Catholic Book Club
Josephine Ward was one of British Catholicism’s leading lights—and a prolific novelist.
Josephine Ward was a strong critic of Catholic modernism, and many of her novels featured protagonists struggling to reconcile au courant political and religious ideas with the strictures of the Catholic Church.
Posted inFaith, Features
England’s ‘Catholic Moment’: What can the history of British converts tell us about American Catholics?
As our own cultural moment in the United States has included some prominent conversions to Catholicism, what might we learn from some of the more prominent converts in British Catholic history?
Posted inArts & Culture, Catholic Book Club
L.A. and the sacred dream of suburbia, captured by D. J. Waldie
D. J. Waldie’s strikingly beautiful book in 1996 about what it was like to grow up in Lakewood, Calif., “Holy Land,” is one of many writings by this chronicler of Los Angeles’s past and future.
Posted inFaith in Focus, Politics & Society
A prayer for a city I love, the City of Angels
In Los Angeles, people stay for the movie credits. After the awful images of these fires are gone, they will stay to rebuild their city, too.
Posted inArts & Culture, Catholic Book Club
Remembering David Lodge, the ‘agnostic Catholic’ who captured the post-Vatican II zeitgeist
David Lodge’s novels—as well as his many works of nonfiction—made him an important figure in 20th-century British literature. He also captured well the angst of many lay Catholics in the aftermath of Vatican II.
Posted inArts & Culture, Film
A Bob Dylan nerd reviews ‘A Complete Unknown’
As a young Bob Dylan in “A Complete Unknown,” Timothee Chalamet captures some of the iconic singer’s enigmatic yet magnetic personality.