Books

If Thomas O rsquo Malley rsquo s first book In the Province of Saints is anything to judge by he has a real future ahead of him as a novelist The story takes place in Ireland more specifically in the southern part between 1976 and 1981 But geography alas does not spare his characters from

Thomas King a professor of theology at Georgetown University has written a fine book deeply rooted in his lifelong meditation on Pierre Teilhard de Chardin his fellow Jesuit whom he approaches above all as a priest and as a scientist with a priestly calling The introduction clearly explains Ki

When a poet writes ldquo I rdquo what does he mean An Irish poet-friend tells me his ldquo I rdquo is always a fiction based on himself but never his real self Literary critics reading an ldquo I rdquo poem discuss the ldquo speaker rdquo or the ldquo voice rdquo but not the ldquo w

In the last months of his long lifehe died at 98 in 2004Cardinal Franz K nig the former Archbishop of Vienna wrote this very personal book In Open to God Open to the World he highlights milestones in his service to the church as the Holy See rsquo s longest serving cardinal and tireless bridge

Scholars have long noted a religious quality in Shakespeare rsquo s drama in which human histories are magnified through symbolic rites of passage sacramental language and ritual We witness life death and resurrection in his plays Over the past decade scholarly attention has focused on Shakespe

Consider that cancer is the leading killer of Americans under age 85 that 40 percent of victims are under 65 and that for 25 years childhood cancers have been increasing 1 4 percent annually mostly because of environmental contaminants If the National Institutes of Health are right industrial to

The study of the Catholic response to the Holocaust goes beyond the event itself as demonstrated in this work by Suzanne Brown-Fleming a historian with the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum In The Holocaust and Catholic Conscience she probes the career of Aloisius Muench one of the most co

My parish church in the Williamsburg section of Brooklyn announced its political inclinations with a poster hung in a glass-encased bulletin board just inside the front entrance during the 1960 rsquo s and early 70 rsquo s The photo showed an aborted fetus lying at the bottom of a silver bucket wit

On khokmes as they say in Yiddish but seriously nobody not even a veteran scholar like Professor Sachar could compress the whole of modern Jewish history into a mere 800-plus pages with alas no maps photographs or statistical tables Not if you start roughly with the horrific massacres le

It is difficult if not impossible to overstate the dramatic changes in American religious life in the mid- to late 20th century Regardless of whether one views them a success or failure no one can argue that Catholic religious sisters burst through the Second Vatican Council rsquo s doors and wi