Arts & Culture

In his essay Reflections on Gandhi 1949 George Orwell declared Saints should always be judged guilty until they are proved innocent By that standard Leonard Woolf 1880-1969 needs to undergo severe scrutiny since Beatrice Webb called him a saint with very considerable intelligence a man wit

Any reviewer will find his benevolence to an author increased when he finds a distant relative playing even a minor role in the narrative In the Rev Andrew M Greeley rsquo s latest novel Irish Linen I found Tom Linehan serving as the Irish charg eacute d rsquo affaires in Switzerland in 1944

A wave of recent books has left the distinct impression that the harnessing of religious ideals to political power has ushered in a new Dark Ages in American public life In God and the Welfare State Lew Daly departs from the trend of near-hysterical claims by exploring the religious underpinnings

As a former Wall Street Journal reporter Paul Barrett knows how to get people to talk to him American Islam is organized around interviews with seven representatives of the Islamic faith some immigrants others born in the United States But in preparing this book the author interviewed hundred

In 1940 the Carnegie Foundation commissioned a study to assess the state of race relations in America segregation and white supremacy in the South The Foundation chose a Swedish sociologist named Gunnar Myrdal to lead the project They selected a non-American scholar because they wanted an outsid

The Middle Ages are popularly perceived as a period of intellectual and cultural stagnation This perspective is reinforced by the common description of this era as the Dark Ages or the fact that the word medieval is frequently used as a pejorative in our modern vocabulary These stereotypes many o

Professor Bart Ehrman chair of the religious studies department at the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill has written a widely used introduction to the New Testament and many books about early Christianity The Learning Company runs full-page ads in The New York Times Book Review for his l

No one 8217 s life runs a straight course There are arrows and roadblocks and turns we take that influence the subsequent journey The remarkable life of the Kenyan environmentalist Wangari Maathai founder of the Green Belt Movement and winner of the 2004 Nobel Peace Prize is no exception In th

In the past few years we have been exposed to displays of moral evil 9 11 01 and natural catastrophes the tsunami in 2004 hurricanes Katrina and Rita in 2005 At each point the question ldquo Why rdquo occupied many of us The ldquo religious rdquo discussion too often came down to whether