Arts & Culture

If Franz Kafka were to rewrite the British television comedy ldquo Yes Prime Minister rdquo the result might resemble Jos Saramago rsquo s new novel Seeing The Nobel Prize-winning novelist weaves wry sardonic humor into his dark parable of an unnamed nation locked down by fear of terrorism

Everybody wants a piece of Flaubert His contemporaries Victor Hugo Ivan Turgenev Emile Zola Guy de Maupassant and others hailed his genius Twentieth-century critics from Erich Auerbach to Lionel Trilling ushered him into the pantheon of modernism Jean-Paul Sartre ground out five massive vol

Next year will mark 50 years since John S Dunne C S C fresh from writing a dissertation on Thomas Aquinas under the direction of Bernard Lonergan S J at the Gregorian University in Rome joined the theology faculty at the University of Notre Dame In those five decades he has published 16 boo

Among the signal achievements of the Second Vatican Council is the Roman Catholic Church rsquo s irreversible commitment to the cause of Christian unity How did the church come to change its preconciliar triumphalist insistence on the ldquo return rdquo of ldquo schismatics and heretics rdquo

I first met John McGahern in the 1990 rsquo s when I was teaching a summer course in contemporary Irish literature for Georgetown students at Trinity College in Dublin where John was then residing He was one of the people I was hoping to entice to come to my class and when I asked him he agreed

In his new book Before the Next Attack Yale law professor Bruce Ackerman takes a complex constitutional proposal directly to the American public and he does a terrific job explaining the what and why of his proposals as well as the history of emergency power in the United States I am sure my le

Years ago my husband and I spent a grim rainy day at the former Dachau Concentration Camp in southern Germany The museum rsquo s last exhibit in white letters against a black background was a single line from American philosopher George Santayana Those who forget the past are condemned to repea

I owe a great deal to Henri J M Nouwen His writing which I first discovered in the 1970 rsquo s helped clarify the spiritual life for me I continue to read and profit from his books and recommend them to others Oddly I felt a certain trepidation about this posthumous work on spiritual direct

This volume exquisitely edited by Kenneth Himes O F M is a superb contribution to Catholic social ethics and will undoubtedly serve as a basic text providing a synthetic statement of the last century of the Catholic social tradition While its primary audience is the Catholic community it prov

Can anyone seriously doubt that sustained reflection on the topic of peacemaking is among the most urgent tasks facing humankind In the wake of the bloodiest century in history the Christian community has a solemn obligation to share with the wider human society whatever insights it can glean from