Books

Last month students in my class on women and Catholicism spent an evening at a Catholic Worker House in South Bend Ind We prepared a meal shared it with the guests and listened to an after-dinner talk by Margaret Pfeil a staff member at the house and my colleague at Notre Dame Pfeil spoke abou

American Catholics have persisted in viewing both U S secular and church history as primarily a movement of Northern European people and institutions westward across the barren plains But the deeper truth that inexorably is catching up with us is that it is also increasingly the history of movem

I plan to make this book required reading for my first-year students at Loyola University Chicago rsquo s Stritch School of Medicine I also would highly recommend it to anyone facing serious illness And frankly that rsquo s all of us It is a marvelous book that will change those who read it and

In October 1967 hundreds of thousands of college students and ordinary citizens gathered in Washington D C to express their outrage about the Vietnam War The pranksters of that time including Abbie Hoffman and Jerry Rubin told the newsmen covering the march that they also hoped to levitate the

In an age habituated to sensationalism and big effects an austere and nuanced novel like Isobel English rsquo s Every Eyelike the work of her French predecessor Gustave Flaubertmay not appeal to everyone Even Madame Bovary has the soap opera appeal of adultery a theme by the way it shares with

Jason Robertsa contributor to The Village Voice among other publicationsbecame curious about a certain Englishman named James Holman after reading a brief chapter on him in a book about eccentric travelers Trying to learn more about the 19th-century blind man and his extensive travels Roberts was

Almost 30 years ago when the field of medical ethics was still in its youth the Dominicans Benedict Ashley and Kevin O rsquo Rourke published Health Care Ethics To see how that professional discipline is now moving into its maturity one need only inspect Ashley and O rsquo Rourke rsquo s conside

I carried a copy of Seamus Heaney rsquo s latest collection District and Circle with me to Europe this summer reading it on buses and trains and at outdoor restaurants in London This was the rainless summer when London hit 100 degrees Fahrenheit for the first time in recorded history happily

In 1969 the Apollo astronaut Edwin Aldrin described the ldquo magnificent desolation rdquo of the moon As the United States reflects on its lengthening wars in Iraq and Afghanistan this Veterans Day the issue of how most appropriately to honor soldiers who have died in battle is elevated profoun

Imagine a feasta symposium really in the ancient Greek sense of the wordin which the aim is not merely to enjoy good food and drink but also to share in thoughtful conversation The guest of honor a distinguished Christian thinker is the main course but other luminaries are present occasionall