Books

Has the pluribus in the vaunted boast begun to submerge even eradicate the unum America has become Robert Wuthnow the director of Princeton University rsquo s Center for the Study of American Religion argues in this new book a more religiously diverse nation Buddhist and Hindu temples and Mo

Jacques Maritain was the incarnation of Catholic intellectual lifea spirit alive with ideas supremely sensitive to other persons filled with the charity of the Gospels His journey in this world toward the homeland beyond was made possible as he thought by his companion and wife Ra ssa Oumanso

These books are the first two titles in The Ignatian Impulse Series a new series offered by Ave Maria Press ldquo By providing brief readable and engaging books rdquo the publisher tells us the series ldquo presents the spirituality of Ignatius of Loyola as a practical resource for spiritual

It is no secret that in the last 40 years there has been a steep decline in the number of clergy working in parishes as well as religious congregations staffing schools and other Catholic institutions In parishes the women and men filling the roles once performed exclusively by clergy and religiou

A generation ago the rock band The Who venerated and mocked their spiritually restless Baby Boomer peers in their song The Seeker bragging that I rsquo ve got values but I don rsquo t know how or why According to a major new study of teenagers and religion spiritual seekers have all but vanished

ldquo But what if Scola becomes pope rdquo Such was my e-mail response to America rsquo s request that I do this book review John Paul II had just died Benedict XVI had yet to be elected And Angelo Cardinal Scola was on the papabile list Needless to say Scola the patriarch of Venice did not

The novelist Michael Cunningham leapt into the spotlight with The Hours 1998 a meditative spinoff of Virginia Woolf rsquo s Mrs Dalloway Cunningham rsquo s book won the Pulitzer Prize and enjoyed a successful second run in a filmed version four years later Now he has written another trio of in

In the aftermath of the great tsunami of late December 2004 there emerged a lively public philosophical and theological debate in the popular media Where was God in this terrible event Why did God allow it to happen What did the victims do to deserve this Did they do anything wrong at all How

With the publication of One Nation Uninsured the Florida State University sociologist Jill Quadagno joins an array of scholars who have sought to account for the failure of national health care in the United States and to explain why we get so little health for our health care expenditure Classic

Thomas Carlyle might not have called the study of economic matters dismal if instead of debating the gloomy Thomas Malthus on population growth he had come across the economist Steven Levitt and his often humorous takes on whether drug-dealing really pays or the effect that the name a parent selec