Books

When The Wall Street Journal announced last year that Bob Dylan had lifted lyrics in his most recent album from an obscure Japanese author it came as no surprise to generations of Dylan fans who had long recognized him as music rsquo s most prolific borrower When ldquo Blowin rsquo in the Wind r

You rsquo ll need an iron stomach and a leather bottom to get through these two investigative reports but if you want to know about sexual abuse in the church they are indispensable You will also have to put up with cute titles and chapter heads as well as an occasionally questionable judgment

El Salvador rsquo s civil war took 175 000 lives and during the dozen years of its duration human rights abuses ran rampant Those who denounced the abuses mdash like Archbishop Oscar Romero the six Jesuits at the University of El Salvador and other activists mdash were targeted for assassination

On Aug 15 the feast of Mary rsquo s Assumption a homeless Chaucer scholar on antipsychotic drugs has a vision that convinces him that 14-year-old Francesca Dunn is the Virgin pregnant with the Savior Certain he rsquo s been elected to serve and protect her Chester finds the girl at a Colorado

Recently I received an e-mail from a Jesuit newly arrived in El Salvador to do some pastoral work He remarked on how his eyes had been opened by the reactions of ordinary Salvadorans to Gospel stories He wrote I rsquo m struck by how differently they hear the Scriptures as a result of having been

The most dramatic event of the 21st century thus far has been the destruction of the twin towers at the World Trade Center for many the symbol of the capitalist Christian or post-Christian West in New York City on Sept 11 2001 This act was perpetrated by men who identified themselves as Muslim

How could the world get along without nostalgia Well until 1688 it had to do without that word because it hadn rsquo t been invented until the Swiss physician Johannes Hofer simply translated the humble German Heimweh ldquo homesickness rdquo or literally ldquo home-pain rdquo into Greek

The day Christopher S Wren retired from The New York Times newsroom he made a statement about how he planned to live the rest of his life Rather than just sit passively back and let retirement wash over him the former foreign correspondent strapped on a backpack slipped into his hiking boots and

Lawrence S Cunningham rsquo s small study of St Francis demonstrates the value of sound critical judgment and solid theology for grounding healthy devotion to the saints and deepening the faith in the Christian realities to which they dedicated themselves In A Modest Foreword Cunningham sets out

Lynne Sharon Schwartz is an award-winning author of 14 books of fiction and non-fiction whose principal terrain is the psychological territory of domestic relationshipsthe minefields or mindfields of marriages family relations couples at the edge and partners in the act of uncoupling or just bar