In ‘Sister Death,’ Beatrice Marovich explores the connections between living and dying in a way that seeks to refute the concept of death as enemy while not accepting it as something that is good or desirable.
Books
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Vatican II: Rupture or reform?
George Weigel’s new book, ‘To Sanctify the World: The Vital Legacy of Vatican II,’ is a defense of the council against those who think it created a rupture with tradition (for better or for worse).
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Review: Faith and activism in the City of Angels
‘City of Dignity,’ by Sean T. Dempsey, S.J., tells a story of how progressive religious leaders, organizations and institutions worked to shape Los Angeles into a city where dignity flourished through their grassroots organizing and activism in the decades after World War II until the mid-1990s.
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Review: Violence and hospitality in a seaside town
In ‘Vigil Harbor,’ Julia Glass shares a complex tale about a town’s history of close encounters with violence, but also about the open and helpful community that unintentionally enables some of the calamities that ensue.
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The ‘holy whodunits’ of G.K. Chesterton, Agatha Christie and Ralph McInerny
For Chesterton, Christie and McInerny, a mystery story was the perfect device for showing how even dramatic sins, like murder, spring from the fallen condition that all human beings share.
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The works of Brian Doyle remind us of the unique holiness of children and childhood
The writing of Brian Doyle, who died in 2017, hummed with an undercurrent that honors children and invites the reader to adopt their posture of innocence.
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Review: The British monarchy’s fraught (and sometimes bloody) history with Catholicism
A new study exploring the relationship between religion and the English monarchy by Catherine Pepinster explores the impact Elizabeth II and the monarchs that preceded her have had on the Church of England as well as on other faith traditions in their realm.
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Review: Wendell Berry on healing our divisions
In his new book, ‘The Need to Be Whole,’ Wendell Berry strives to give a glimpse of the undivided foundation that underpins all he has ever tried to think and say.
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‘Dirtbag, Massachusetts’: a former Catholic’s memoir about growing up in a turbulent home—and a broken church
Isaac Fitzgerald’s collection of essays Dirtbag, Massachusetts: A Confessional isn’t a Catholic memoir. Except when it is.
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Review: Do Catholic universities have a future?
The central concern of the Rev. James Heft in his new book is not only how “to preserve the continuity of the Catholic intellectual tradition, but also recognize how it might be adapted.”