Books

When Michael Dirda took this summer off discerning readers of The Washington Post Book World were most likely disappointed They enjoy Dirda rsquo s erudite yet accessible reviews each Sunday The range of Dirda rsquo s interests and the breadth and depth of his literary knowledge are quite impress

Karen Armstrong rsquo s latest book covers arguably the most ambitious topic that she has yet attempted The scope is vast covering multiple continents cultures and chronologies Hundreds of years dozens of major figures and a landscape that stretches from Mount Olympus to the Great Wall of China

Charles D rsquo Ambrosio says that as a young man he turned to fiction in part as a Daedalian act of snobbery against aspects of his Jesuit education In an essay on J D Salinger published in 2001 D rsquo Ambrosio recounts how during his time at Seattle Prep reading Joyce and other modern write

Talk about heroic labors To flesh out the tale of his quirky Irish-American theologian Fr Eddie Danaher George McCauley a New York Jesuit invents major chunks of history an imaginary religious order the Christian Fathers founded in the 16th century by a swashbuckling Portuguese explorer-tur

In the highly charged and fertile theological world out of which Vatican II was born there was widespread agreement that the Catholic Church needed to rethink itself Stale Thomistic recitations seemed out of step with emerging ways of looking at Christ the world the liturgy the role of both ord

Alan Wolfe director of the Boisi Center for Religion and American Public Life at Boston College has written a sharp indictment of the Bush administration and the conservatives who support it Wolfe rsquo s overall interpretive point in Does American Democracy Still Work is that conservatives wh

Alice McDermott rsquo s new novel After This vividly often heart-rendingly portrays roughly 25 years up through 1977 in the lives of the Keane family John and Mary and their four children Jacob Michael Annie and Clare The novel rsquo s Irish-Catholic Long Island milieu will be familiar to

If asked ldquo Who is Satan rdquo most of us might give an answer something like this Satan or the Devil is the fallen angel who persuaded Adam and Eve to commit the ldquo original sin rdquo Also known as the Antichrist and Lucifer he now presides over hell and entices people on earth to sin

The North Atlantic captivity of the church is drawing to an end The center of Christian gravity is undeniably shifting southward This development is not a blip on the religious radar screen but a profound permutation Globally a major gravitational adjustment is occurring in the population density