Books

It is rare that the author of one extraordinary book should follow it a decade later with another of almost equal power And yet this is what Helen Prejean C S J has done in The Death of Innocents An Eyewitness Account of Wrongful Executions Already an acclaimed author for her Dead Man Walking

This book applies a singular approach to the study of the Gospel By searching out and using the questions Jesus asked during his ministry the author provides readers with topics for Scripture study contemplation and also perhaps action Father Dear arranges these questions under 19 general them

You have to warm to a man who spent the night reading The Old Man and the Sea after he received word that he was to be made a bishop The account of the future John Paul II reading Hemingway on a train as he returned after being informed that he was to be made a bishop to a group of young people wi

Archaeological digs in the land of Israel often shed light on the Jewish and Christian Bibles and on the persons and events that occupy their pages Sometimes the discoveries make us rethink long-held ideas One need recall only the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls for example which is helping us

One finds in theological circles frequent appeal to the ldquo sacramental imagination rdquo as a distinguishing trait of Catholicism Like all truths when unimaginatively intoned it quickly becomes platitudinous The Rev M Owen Lee rsquo s finely crafted and deeply moving memoir never invokes t

The ultra right may have the loudest talking heads these days Limbaugh O rsquo Reilly Hannity etc but the left has cornered the market on stylish witty substantial writers Lewis Lapham Frank Rich Maureen Dowd Hendrik Hertzberg and others None of the leftist gang are likely to become

On his honeymoon Nathaniel Hawthorne and his wife Sophia read to each other the entirety of Milton rsquo s Paradise Lost an apt symbol for Hawthorne rsquo s persistent preoccupation with issues of sin guilt and redemption To mark the 200th anniversary last summer of Hawthorne rsquo s birth th

Samuel Huntington the Harvard professor who gave us The Clash of Civilizations and The Remaking of World Order has weighed in on the current discussions of religion politics race and ethnicity with his extended meditation or rather screed on American national identity It is a maddening book