Cardinal Timothy M. Dolan reviews Msgr. Thomas Shelley’s ‘John Tracy Ellis: An American Catholic Reformer,’ calling it “a well-documented yet very readable biography of the ‘dean’ of American Catholic history.”
Books
Posted inArts & Culture, Books
What the editors of America magazine are reading this summer
America’s editors on some books that might catch our readers’ fancy in these final weeks of summer.
Posted inArts & Culture, Books
Review: The underlying philosophy of Black Lives Matter
Vincent Lloyd’s ‘Black Dignity’ is is a profound challenge to anyone who takes seriously the struggle for human dignity, antiracism and the work of dismantling white supremacy.
Posted inArts & Culture, Books
Review: A history of books dating back to antiquity
Irene Vallejo’s history of books found an audience outside of the academy because it speaks to present concerns and speaks on behalf of many book readers.
Posted inArts & Culture, Books
Review: Geetanjali Shree’s new novel is one woman’s surprising reincarnation story
Frank Wynne, chair of this year’s Booker judges, noted that translating ‘Tomb of Sand’ presented “huge challenges” because the novel is about words, language and storytelling, not just characters and plot. Another judge added that it is “safe to say this [novel] is like nothing else you have ever read.”
Posted inArts & Culture, Books
Mom’s Still In Bed: Mona Simpson on family, fate and mental illness
Mona Simpson’s latest novel unfurls into a stirring cartography of the impacts of a mother’s deteriorating mental health on her three children.
Posted inArts & Culture, Books
Review: An inner-city Boston parish’s lessons for building a vibrant church community
‘People Get Ready’ tells how an inner-city Boston parish managed to transform itself into a vibrant church community, an experience that Reynolds believes holds lessons for a new understanding of the role of the parish in Catholic ecclesiology.
Posted inArts & Culture, Books
Review: An LGBT scholar’s memoir on growing up Catholic
In his new memoir, a noted scholar of L.G.B.T. history describes a world of extended family, Catholic schools and parish life that offered a relatively safe space for him to discover himself as a politically progressive gay man.
Posted inArts & Culture, Books
Review: Hans Urs von Balthasar’s theological vision of the Eucharist, heaven and a Christ-centered anthropology
Jonathan Ciraulo claims that “Balthasar’s theology as a whole is concerned, one could say consumed, with making the Eucharist the linchpin for all speculative dogmatics.” It is worth considering the ramifications of this view in four crucial areas of theology: Christology, theological anthropology, Trinitarian theology and eschatology.
Posted inArts & Culture, Books
Remembering Martin Amis: literary bad boy—and an unexpected moralist
Martin Amis leaves behind a remarkable corpus of fiction, essays and memoir—even if he could be eminently dislikable.