Jesus says, Woe to your puritan work ethics.
Arts & Culture
Posted inArts & Culture, Poetry
‘She was startled by what the angel said and tried to figure out what this greeting meant’
And therefore, all the more believable,
That God sent a tiny angel with a chinstrap made of feathered jewels,
Posted inArts & Culture, Books
In the belly of the beast: Daniel Kraus’s novel ‘Whalefall’ considers the power of communion and grief
Sucked into the belly of an 80-foot sperm whale, scuba diver Jay Gardiner reconciles the loss of his father and challenges the power of the creatures of the sea in Daniel Kraus’s novel ‘Whalefall.’
Posted inArts & Culture, Books
Review: Daniel Hornsby’s new novel seeks meaning in a world gone mad
Daniel Hornsby’s new page-turning novel ‘Sucker’ is consistently funny, a sobering screengrab of our wealth- and power-obsessed nation.
Posted inArts & Culture, Books
Review: How can we fix our hospitals?
In his debut book, ‘The People’s Hospital: Hope and Peril in American Medicine,’ Ricardo Nuila presents the conflict between the profit motive of health care and the art of medicine by describing the hospitals that work for people and the hospitals that do not.
Posted inArts & Culture, Books
Review: The shameful history of when the Jesuits sold enslaved people
In ‘The 272: The Families Who Were Enslaved and Sold to Build the American Catholic Church,’ Rachel Swarns tells of “one of the largest documented slave sales in the nation,” the Jesuit sale of 272 enslaved persons in 1838.
Posted inArts & Culture, Books
Three new books expose the shameful history of Ireland’s Magdalene laundries
In recent years, several books have attempted to piece together what really happened behind the doors of power in Ireland’s Magdalene laundries, including Emer Martin’s novel ‘The Cruelty Men,’ Claire Keegan’s novella ‘Small Things Like These,’ and new collection of essays, ‘A Dublin Magdalene Laundry: Donnybrook and Church-State Power in Ireland,’ edited by Mark Coen, Katherine O’Donnell and Maeve O’Rourke.
Posted inArts & Culture, Books
The devastation and dishonesty of the ‘wonder drug,’ thalidomide
It was touted as a sedative with no hangover. It was hailed as non-addictive. It was rumored to present no side effects. It was trumpeted in medical journal ads as “astonishingly safe” and “completely non-poisonous.”
Posted inArts & Culture, Catholic Book Club
Andre Dubus III on faith, fiction and his absent, famous father
To be the writerly son of a writerly father is not always the easiest vocation. When that parent is as famous as Andre Dubus, it must be doubly difficult. But who knows: Maybe it can make for great art? One might ask Andre Dubus III.
Posted inArts & Culture, Short Take
U.S. Open tennis champ Coco Gauff and the witness of prayer
When we see a spectacular athlete praying in public, we can see her as a sort of athletic Christian soldier, a “counternarrative” to a godless culture or shallow world—and miss the simple, moving experience of the athlete, who is Christian, who is praying.