Arts & Culture

One of my strongest primal memories is of the Knights of Columbus As far back as I can remember they were as present and as taken-for-granted as the Austin Boulevard Bus the Lake Street L and Pedersen rsquo s Ice Cream Store Commodore Barry Council of which my father was a member and once Grand

In his justly celebrated How to Read a Poem and Fall in Love With Poetry 1999 Edward Hirsch becomes both teacher and enthusiast We encounter a man at once passionate and informed his writing as infectious as it is instructive In his new release Poet rsquo s Choice Hirsch remains much the sam

There is a master of American letters working in our midst today of whom not many readers are aware For more than 23 years the novelist Stephen Wright has written uncompromisingly and astutely about America in meticulously crafted prose and witty realistic dialogue that reflects the spiritual wan

The award-winning poetry of Louise Gl ck former poet laureate of the United States is like the fiction of Henry James the more you reread it the more it entrances yet the more elusive it proves There are 17 poems in this slim volume a handful of them are multipart Thematically and in many ot

Interview with James Martin S J on WHYY Radio about his book Readers of spiritual autobiographies possess some inner verifier that helps them sniff out the phoniesthose who pose posture and pontificateand to affirm those who risk exposing their fumbling and bumbling their reticence and resist

While reading Maureen Fitzgerald rsquo s doctoral dissertation a few years ago I was introduced to Sister Mary Irene Fitzgibbon an Irish-born Sister of Charity whose work on behalf of poor working women in New York City had become legendary She established the Foundling Asylum in 1869 and supervi

One might not expect a book about Carthusians ldquo the Western world rsquo s most austere monastic order rdquo to be a page turner but this sensitively written volume is just that The author reconstructs the pre-1965 Carthusian way of life so vividly that the reader nearly shivers with the mo

For most people spring means warm weather the return of birds and the flowering of nature For serious baseball fans it means spring training the anticipation of a new season and time to read a book about the game A good choice would be former baseball Commissioner Fay Vincent rsquo s opening v

Once upon a time all Francophones were taught to write clearly and distinctly la Descartes nowadays it seems they are trying their best to write obscurely la Michel Foucault And Abdellah Hammoudi a Morocco-born Princeton anthropologist with a Ph D from the Sorbonne 1977 succeeds onl