Arts & Culture

A generation ago the rock band The Who venerated and mocked their spiritually restless Baby Boomer peers in their song The Seeker bragging that I rsquo ve got values but I don rsquo t know how or why According to a major new study of teenagers and religion spiritual seekers have all but vanished

ldquo But what if Scola becomes pope rdquo Such was my e-mail response to America rsquo s request that I do this book review John Paul II had just died Benedict XVI had yet to be elected And Angelo Cardinal Scola was on the papabile list Needless to say Scola the patriarch of Venice did not

The novelist Michael Cunningham leapt into the spotlight with The Hours 1998 a meditative spinoff of Virginia Woolf rsquo s Mrs Dalloway Cunningham rsquo s book won the Pulitzer Prize and enjoyed a successful second run in a filmed version four years later Now he has written another trio of in

In the aftermath of the great tsunami of late December 2004 there emerged a lively public philosophical and theological debate in the popular media Where was God in this terrible event Why did God allow it to happen What did the victims do to deserve this Did they do anything wrong at all How

With the publication of One Nation Uninsured the Florida State University sociologist Jill Quadagno joins an array of scholars who have sought to account for the failure of national health care in the United States and to explain why we get so little health for our health care expenditure Classic

Thomas Carlyle might not have called the study of economic matters dismal if instead of debating the gloomy Thomas Malthus on population growth he had come across the economist Steven Levitt and his often humorous takes on whether drug-dealing really pays or the effect that the name a parent selec

The question that forms the title of Michael Crosby rsquo s work reveals the perspective from which he approaches the situation of contemporary religious life It is also a measure of hisand the book rsquo shonesty and realism He eschews a repetition of the contemporary rhetoric about religious lif

The best-selling novelist and semiotician Umberto Eco now applies his considerable skill to the matter of identity Along the way readers too will ponder who we are and how we know who we are In The Mysterious Flame of Queen Loana An Illustrated Novel Eco rsquo s protagonist Yambo full name Gi

Anne Lamott strews many bitter and distracting political asides throughout her new book of essays Plan B Further Thoughts on Faith but her honesty and humor rescue the book from being a polemic As she did in Traveling Mercies Lamott shares her day-to-day struggle to live as a Christian and the

Eudora Welty closed her best-selling autobiography One Writer rsquo s Beginnings with the words As you have seen I am a writer who came of a sheltered life A sheltered life can be a daring one as well For all serious daring comes from within Originally opposed to the idea of a biography towar