Books

The trouble with philosophers is that they think ideas are everything The trouble with Jungian psychologists is that they think timeless archetypes shape all human behavior James Hillman is both a philosopher and a Jungian psychologist and he is vulnerable to both charges but in this rambling r

In Dynamic Equivalence The Living Language of Christian Worship Father Keith Pecklers offers a fascinating narrative of the mid-20th-century Vernacular Society in the United States interwoven with the larger history of vernacular worship in the church The whole story is framed by an opening chap

In 1999 the Modern Library joined the frenzy for Best of lists naming the top 100 English-language novels of the 20th century James T Farrell came in at number 29 with his Studs Lonigan trilogy Young Lonigan The Young Manhood of Studs Lonigan and Judgment Day Amid the subsequent sound and fur

The influenza pandemic that erupted in 1918 was unlike any other disaster in history Estimates set the number as high as 100 million deaths around the world as influenza killed more people in a single year than the Black Death did over a century in the Middle Ages Granted the plague of the 1300

For those interested in the world of incarceration in the United States Criminal Justice Retribution vs Restoration serves as an excellent overview Punishment now predominates and we are reaping the whirlwind in the form of the highest incarceration rate in the world Over two million human bei

Now that the recent flood of books about the quest of the historical Jesus has subsided somewhat it seems inevitable that New Testament scholars should turn to the quest of the historical Paul Two new books about Paul represent serious attempts to write a scholarly biography of Paul and place his

ldquo In its field it is the best book ever written rdquo That was the most enthusiastic of the many enthusiastic assessments that greeted MacCulloch rsquo s book when it appeared in Britain last year It is an assessment with which I agree The book is a monumental achievement that takes readers

Diamonds and dross compete in this book all for a good cause The diamonds the sparkling poems of Gerard Manley Hopkins along with some less known but splendid prose The dross the preface introductions and commentary which are inaccurate overreaching and based on outmoded sources The good c

Nobel Prize-winner Jos Saramago must have been thinking of Franz Kafka rsquo s The Metamorphosis when he wrote this his latest novel In Kafka rsquo s tale Gregor Samsa awakens one morning to find he has been transmogrified into an insect something utterly other than what he once was In The Dou

Imagine this Your teenage son has been tortured to death under the regime of a Latin American military dictator Imagine too that instead of quietly succumbing to your grief you publicly denounce the murder and speak out against the regime mdash that of the Paraguayan dictator Alfredo Stroessner