Joanne Paul wrote her powerful and considerable biography of Thomas More because she finds More’s life relevant to today’s world. But the book also addresses another question: Was More a saintly martyr or a vicious murderer?
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Review: Seeking a healthy planet and a healthy church
In Christina Rivera’s new collection, we wander through waves of connections, an ebb and flow carrying us between climate change, the sixth extinction, motherhood, all kinds of oceans and personal challenges—including the writer’s desire to leave the Catholic Church she was raised in.
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Review: A Jesuit high school whodunit
Anna Bruno’s ‘Fine Young People,’ set at St. Ignatius, an elite Jesuit high school in a Pittsburgh suburb, operates as a whodunit on multiple levels simultaneously.
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Review: Parables of a Greenland priest
Henrik Pontoppidan’s ‘The White Bear’ gives us two novellas that work in conversation with each other. Both feature burly, uncouth protagonists who endure episodes of childhood trauma and develop a fiercely independent way of engaging with the world.
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Review: Molly McNett and making the unsayable sayable
Molly McNett’s ‘Child of These Tears’ displays the difficulties of translation, the irreducibility of meaning, and the frustrating limitations of human nature and society.
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Review: Bennett Cerf, Random House co-founder and superstar editor
Gayle Feldman’s new biography of Bennett Cerf, ‘Nothing Random,’ is a window into the past of American literary culture.
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Sheed & Ward: the unlikely power couple who revolutionized Catholic publishing
As readers mark the centennial of the Sheed & Ward publishing house, we celebrate what “the Sheedwardians”—as that unlikely Catholic power couple sometimes called themselves—meant back in their heyday.
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Pope Leo XIV pens book introduction: Peace is a gift—and a responsibility
“Our heart is the most important battlefield,” Pope Leo writes. “It is there that we must learn the bloodless but necessary victory over the impulses of death and the tendencies toward domination: only peaceful hearts can build a world of peace.”
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Catholics are both/and people. But we still face stark choices in following Christ.
Catholicism is a both/and religion, true, but that puts before us some strong binaries between having faith in Christ or not, between serving the least of these or not.
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Review: Kathleen Norris on a sister’s love
Kathleen Norris’s profound new book ‘Rebecca Sue’ is a kind of double memoir of Norris’s sister, who had suffered from severe mental disabilities, as well of the author herself and her family.