Books

The good life in The Good Life is brittle fragile ironic impermanent And it is often Catholic In these 11 short stories Erin McGraw author of three books and professor of creative writing at Ohio State University watches hears and records contemporary America in 15-page snatches She drops i

One of the most interesting religious developments in the late 20th century has been the warming of relationships between Roman Catholic and Evangelical Christians As William Shea says at the beginning of his book The Lion and the Lamb both have hated each other in the United States since colonia

I first met James DiGiacomo S J in the mid-70 rsquo s at a national workshop he was leading for the Jesuit Secondary Education Association on adolescent moral development In 2003 he retired from a teaching career that spanned more than five decades His dedication to Catholic religious education

Reading a work by someone you rsquo ve met and whose life and ministry you admirethat inevitably counts as a factor when you sit down to review the person rsquo s first book Happily and objectively I can recommend Deirdre Cornell rsquo s A Priceless View My Spiritual Homecoming to all who find pr

Michael McClymond is Clarence Louis and Helen Irene Steber Professor of Theological Studies at Saint Louis University In language that is both accessible and engaging he has provided a concise straightforward and balanced overview of contemporary Jesus studies that should prove helpful to a varie

In the debate over poverty in the United States there are just two ideas or at least it often seems that way One is that people are poor because of the system and that any real solutions will have to come from forces outside the individual namely government That is the view from the doctrinaire

In recent decades a growing number of social scientists like Theda Skocpol whose Diminished Democracy I reviewed in this space 10 20 03 have rediscovered the voluntary associations of civil society that flourish in the social space between government agencies and profit-seeking firms Today bus

This is an important book with much to offer but it is also disappointing Its importance lies in three converging factors The first and most obvious is the subject Martin Luther is a person of almost mythic proportions in the history of the West By his prophetic stance he almost single-handed

Invariably reviewers of writings by the Rev Andrew Greeley feel obliged to mention how much he writes which is a lot Few bother to note how certain basic themes run like threads through his work particularly when Greeley reflects on the mountain of data he has produced over a very long career a

This book takes its title from an observation made by Thomas Jefferson in 1816 ldquo Old Europe will have to lean on our shoulders and to hobble along by our side under the monkish trammels of priests and kings as she can What a colossus shall we be rdquo Niall Ferguson professor of financia