Books

Any organization shrouded in secrecy casts a powerful spell over the imagination Entities as varied as the Mafia and the Central Intelligence Agency inspire fervid fantasies about their hidden powers that only sometimes accord with reality La Cosa Nostra decimated by decades of zealous prosecutio

Voltaire loved to mock the pretensions of scholastic philosophythe notion that some grand intellectualist construction would explain any fact the conviction that one rsquo s own mental categories were the real stuff of the universe the assumption of a guiding intelligence behind every event What

Those who don rsquo t know history are doomed to repeat it Or in Woody Allen rsquo s more memorable paraphrase History repeats itself It has to Nobody listens the first time round In great history writing the author immerses us in a world vastly different from our own while somehow demonstrat

Bruce Feiler is one American determined to find meaning in the terrorist attacks of Sept 11 2001 and the war in Iraq mdash and he does it in one of the most dangerous places on earth As a follow-up to his Walking the Bible 2002 Feiler returns to the Middle East to answer the question ldquo

W H Auden – who like T S Eliot was pre-eminent in 20th century English-language poetry – remained at or near the center of Western cultural life from the 1920 rsquo s until his death in the early 1970 rsquo s With his gaze focused unflinchingly on matters great and small during those years A

Anne Hunt an Australian Catholic theologian and author of several previous books on the doctrine of the Trinity aims in this book ldquo to explore and present the trinitarian nexus or interconnection of the mystery of the Trinity with the other great mysteries of the Christian faith rdquo Thus

This is a difficult book to classify It is not history or theology or philosophy nor is it poetry exegesis criticism or hagiography mdash although it includes something of each Perhaps it might be considered a manual for converts a handbook for participants in a parish adult initiation group

If she were a name-dropper Jane Kopas might tell us that she and Pope John XXIII agree about many things She would agree with his opening address at the Second Vatican Council when the pope attentive to reading the signs of the times said that the substance of the ancient doctrine of the deposi

Despite its title this book is not about controversial displays of the Ten Commandments in public buildings This issue is not even mentioned Rather Chris Hedges focuses on the life-giving force of the Ten Commandments in our lives as individuals and as a country The commandments are guideposts

A friend reports the story of a woman widowed from a Catholic husband with two small children Honoring her pledge to raise her children as Catholics she inquired whether she too might become a Catholic But she was discouraged from pursuing her interest by the indifference of the two priests she