The novelist Iris Murdoch died only two years ago at the age of 79, but already a memoir, film and biography have appeared to preserve her memory for devoted fans and to introduce her to new audiences. In Iris Murdoch: A Life, Peter J. Conradi offers a wide-ranging look at the life of a writer and philosopher who had a remarkable “hunger for the spiritual in a post-theistic age.”
Arts & Culture
Posted inArts & Culture, Film
Fellowship of the Wrong: ‘The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring’
What follows should come with a warning label for a goodly number of longtime readers. It is time for us Catholics to turn up the lights and take a second look at that brand of mid-century Anglo-Catholicism from both sides of the papal divide that dominated our undergraduate days.
Posted inArts & Culture, Short Take
Between the Notes
At his 80th birthday party last year, celebrated with dozens of friends in the garden of his home in northwestern Connecticut, Isaac Stern asked me to sit next to him at dinner. Rarely have I felt so honored. His luminous personality represented to me the perfect combination of a monumentally succes
Posted inArts & Culture, Books
Crusader for a better society
Maurice Isserman the William R Kenan Jr Professor of History at Hamilton College in Clinton N Y has a well-earned reputation as a leading historian of the American political left His specialty has led him to explore the life of the socialist activist Michael Harrington (1928-89).
Posted inArts & Culture, Books
A Writer’s Writer Remembers
Seven years ago in ‘Acts A Writer: Reflections on the Church, Writing and His Own Life,’ novelist Larry Woiwode interleaved his idiosyncratic meditations on Luke’s narrative of the first Apostles with his own story of giving up an English professor’s job in upstate New York.
Posted inArts & Culture, Books
A Changing Landscape?
Mike Davis is a lively and gifted writer of the left with the flair—even if often polemical—of a born journalist.
Posted inArts & Culture, Columns
Marching Season
This year’s parades will be a test of the great new arrangement in Northern Ireland. The new power-sharing government is back in business in Belfast, and one day people will find it hard to believe that it could be otherwise. In that perhaps not-so-distant day, full-fledged citizens of the thi
Posted inArts & Culture, Books
Renewing the Earth
As an 11-year-old boy Thomas Berry probing the red hills of his home in North Carolina skipped across a creek and found himself in a meadow Seeing the white lilies cresting above the dense grass he listened to the crickets rsquo song drift toward the distant woods and the wisps of cloud in the
Posted inArts & Culture, Books
Setting the Record Straight
What do you do when you are the ex-president of a country that no longer exists with a majority of your countrymen bitterly blaming you for their own troubled situations ?
