I dare say having Tom Cruise walk across the big screen toting a gun is more effective at selling firearms than a flurry of Republican ads.
Arts & Culture
Posted inArts & Culture, Film
Review: The ‘Downton Abbey’ characters already got happy endings. So why do they need a new film?
The danger with returning to characters who have struggled to find their way and earned their success is that if you don’t have a new story worthy of them, you risk undermining all that they have achieved.
Posted inArts & Culture, Catholic Book Club
Larry Woiwode: farmer, author, Christian sage
For his novels, memoirs, biographies and collections of short stories and poetry, Larry Woiwode is considered by some critics to be one of the greatest American authors of the 20th century.
Posted inArts & Culture, Television
‘Ted Lasso’ and ‘Fleabag’ and all the shows that are too awesome to watch (so I won’t)
My heart is not large enough, my consciousness is not spacious enough for all the spot-on characters, the hectic energies, the ripping stories. I am not skillful, I think, at TV.
Posted inArts & Culture, Books
Review: Thomas Merton’s deep devotion to the Eucharist — and how it called him to radical love
Gregory K. Hillis tackles an argument that has long haunted Thomas Merton’s legacy: that Merton somehow was not a faithful-enough Catholic.
Posted inArts & Culture, Books
The Catholic case for eliminating nuclear weapons
Michael Krepon’s new book provides a key history of the times, events, organizations and people involved in the pursuit of a peaceful approach to national and global security.
Posted inArts & Culture, Books
Long before RBG, Justice John Marshall Harlan was the Supreme Court’s ‘great dissenter’
Peter S. Canellos provides us with a fascinating biography of a Supreme Court judge who was the sole dissenter in both the Civil Rights Cases (1883) and in Plessy v. Ferguson (1896), in which the court held that the Constitution established the separate-but-equal doctrine.
Posted inArts & Culture, Music
Nick Cave is not a practicing Christian. But he wants to be your spiritual director.
For hundreds of thousands who follow his music and his newsletter, The Red Hand Files, Nick Cave has become a pastor of sorts.
Posted inArts & Culture, Catholic Book Club
Mike Davis, Los Angeles and the sins of capitalism
For more than three decades, Mike Davis has offered clear and often stinging counterpoints to the prevailing vision of the “California Dream.”
Posted inArts & Culture, Poetry
The 2022 Foley Contest: Poetry that speaks the unspeakable about the tragedy in Ukraine
We include fragments of poems that, while not contest finalists, provide one more way for America to shine a light on the ongoing horror in Ukraine.