Books

The question that forms the title of Michael Crosby rsquo s work reveals the perspective from which he approaches the situation of contemporary religious life It is also a measure of hisand the book rsquo shonesty and realism He eschews a repetition of the contemporary rhetoric about religious lif

The best-selling novelist and semiotician Umberto Eco now applies his considerable skill to the matter of identity Along the way readers too will ponder who we are and how we know who we are In The Mysterious Flame of Queen Loana An Illustrated Novel Eco rsquo s protagonist Yambo full name Gi

Anne Lamott strews many bitter and distracting political asides throughout her new book of essays Plan B Further Thoughts on Faith but her honesty and humor rescue the book from being a polemic As she did in Traveling Mercies Lamott shares her day-to-day struggle to live as a Christian and the

Eudora Welty closed her best-selling autobiography One Writer rsquo s Beginnings with the words As you have seen I am a writer who came of a sheltered life A sheltered life can be a daring one as well For all serious daring comes from within Originally opposed to the idea of a biography towar

One of the most enduring images I have of my visit to the Shrine of Our Lady of Guadalupe in Mexico City in 1999 is the proliferation of religious goods booths selling every conceivable souvenir or item of devotion which one must pass in order to reach the shrine itself I remember being troubled

In 1954 when the blockbuster horror movie Them hit the silver screen the young Barnard graduate and budding writer Francine du Plessix not yet married to the artist Cleve Gray was off in France Even if she hadn rsquo t been there was no way such a sophisticated intellectual with flawless Fre

Roger Haight needs little introduction to readers of America A Jesuit for over 50 years past president of the Catholic Theological Society of America and the author of several prize-winning books of theology he now teaches at the interdenominational Union Theological Seminary in New York City I

Something happened to the mind of England between the time of Donne and the time of Tennyson and Browning wrote T S Eliot in his 1921 essay The Metaphysical Poets This something was the dissociation of sensibility from which we have never recovered He meant the separation of thought and fe

Saturday brings Ian McEwan rsquo s novel output to a neat dozen with one exception most of them have tended toward brevity rather than length I have read almost all of them and consider myself a fan Ironically McEwan received the Booker Prize for Amsterdam a short novel of intrigue while his