Books

This volume presumes an older one of Selected Poems which was published by New Directions in 1959 and again in 1967 in an enlarged edition with an introduction by Mark Van Doren Van Doren had been Thomas Merton rsquo s university professor and mentor at Columbia It was he who put Merton rsquo s

Robert A Orsi Harvard Divinity School rsquo s Charles Warren Professor of the History of Religion in America takes a complex approach to his own religion and academic disciplines drawing from his Italian-American family history to illustrate how mid-20th-century Catholics in the United States re

New York City in the year 1930 was simultaneously ascending and descending Its most ambitious project was the building of the world rsquo s tallest skyscraper unashamedly called the Empire State Building right in the heart of busy Manhattan Meanwhile its descent was less evident the stock ma

Kishore Mahbubani rsquo s bittersweet assessment of the recent shortcomings of U S foreign policy will more than likely fall upon deaf ears The dean of the Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy in Singapore Mahbubani explains how American leaders have alienated governments around the world a fact

John T Noonan a distinguished scholar and member of the U S Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit in San Francisco grounds A Church That Can and Cannot Change on the fact that the deposit of faith cannot change He then identifies three areas where change in moral principles has undeniably occ

In Gilead Marilynne Robinson rsquo s first novel since she published Housekeeping 25 years ago the author offers a profound prayerfully paced narrative containing a wealth of literary consolations To the reviewer rsquo s bromide ldquo Run don rsquo t walk to your nearest bookstore and buy th

The title of this book is misleading The book is not about the evolution of Christianity but about the evolution of doctrine mdash or theology as Marshall D Johnson calls it in his introduction The 12 crises therefore are crises about what Christians normatively believe The author whose prio

A dark joke about prognostication concerning the successor to Pope John Paul II is that he outlived many of those once considered most likely to succeed A new book on papal succession Heirs of the Fisherman was published not long before the pope took his precipitous turn for the worse While John-

Derek Walcott published his first book of verse Twenty Five Poems at the age of 18 then went on to a career that has produced 20 books of poetry as well as several dozen plays and a dozen works of non-fiction Now we have The Prodigal an epic from this postcolonial nomad who has drifted among Eu