In ‘Who’s Afraid of Gender?,’ Judith Butler contends that the contemporary backlash to “gender” is an attempt to recapture the transforming power structure and return to the (days when it was simple to use gender to organize power in the world.
Books
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Review: Theology and sexual trauma
In ‘Incarnating Grace: A Theology of Healing From Sexual Trauma,’ Julia Feder is not only concerned with rejecting dangerous theological projects that have misled (and mistreated) survivors; she is also keen to plumb the depths of the Christian tradition more positively, for resources that offer meaning, courage and hope.
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What Pope Francis and Ivan Illich prioritize in common: Anti-clericalism, the Global South and the cry of the poor
Ivan Illich was a “radically orthodox” monsignor who remained tradition-minded his entire life. With Pope Francis, his hour may have finally arrived.
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The genius of James Joyce: Sin, guilt and the redemptive power of laughter
For James Joyce, humanity’s faulty condition “is happy because faults, errors, mistakes and misunderstandings” are the birth of comedy, writes Gabrielle Carey in a new biography.
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Augustine, Tolstoy and Sally Rooney: 15 summer reading recs for the beach and the nightstand
Some suggestions from the staff of America for summer reading: books old and new, long and short, funny and sad.
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Review: America’s two-front dilemma in World War II
Books about World War II are ubiquitous in the nonfiction section, but “Hitler’s American Gamble” is the rare recent work with a genuinely new contribution to make, not just to our understanding of the past but also to our understanding of the present.
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Review: A heroine’s journey
Lauren Groff’s new novel inverts Defoe’s “Robinson Crusoe” by casting a girl—and only briefly, much later on in the novel, the woman—as its heroine.
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Review: Integralism, liberalism and the future of Christendom
In “All the Kingdoms of the World¸” Kevin Vallier engages with Catholic integralists, but he opens a bigger question: Is there such a thing as a Catholic politics?
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Review: Mary Beard on Roman imperial power
An account of “what it meant to be a Roman emperor,” Mary Beard’s new book is also a sustained exploration of tradition embodied by an individual ruler.
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How Graham Greene’s ‘Brighton Rock’ helped me become Catholic
‘Brighton Rock’ made me feel ready to become a Catholic after so many years of deliberately not being one. I, too, frequently felt lost and agnostic. The story of Rose and Pinkie—so similar, so different, both human—was like a piece I found that had been missing from my puzzle.