Books

Priests who like being priests are among the happiest men in the world This sentence in Fr Andrew Greeley rsquo s review of The First Five Years of Priesthood by Dean R Hoge lifted me out of my chair when I read it in these pages Am 9 30 02 I sent him an e-mail message You rsquo re right I

The confluence of advances in human genetics and reproductive science has resulted in the ability to design babies ldquo Designing babies rdquo is an imprecise term used by journalists and commentators mdash not by scientists mdash to describe several different reproductive technologies that have

When the second edition of Thomas Bokenkotter rsquo s book appeared in 1990 the publisher boasted that over 125 000 copies were already in circulation Tens of thousands more have surely been sold in the meantime That fact alone testifies to the merits of the book and the need it has filled This

Although Gene Outka rsquo s The Ethics of Human Stem Cell Research first appeared in the Kennedy Institute of Ethics Journal it serves as the centerpiece for the valuable collection God and the Embryo While size alone might indicate its strategic place it is at least two-thirds longer than the ot

Sailing the Wine-Dark Sea is Thomas Cahill rsquo s fourth volume in the Hinges of History series which includes his How the Irish Saved Civilization The Gifts of the Jews and Desire of the Everlasting Hills In these books Cahill interprets the achievements of the ancient civilizations that are f

Tobias Wolff is best known as a memoirist both for This Boy rsquo s Life and In Pharaoh rsquo s Army as well as a fine short-story writer Old School his first novel though clearly labeled a novel takes the form of a first-person memoir about a schoolboy rsquo s encounters with books and their a

Walter Brueggemann has written over two dozen books on nearly every section of the Hebrew Bible Professor emeritus of biblical studies at Columbia Theological Seminary he is a widely acclaimed scholar who constantly applies new methods of reflection to explain the richness of biblical texts In th

With another presidential election looming on the horizon voter turnout will be a major public issue Political participation however is just one measure of civic engagement and social capital Other measures ranging from volunteering and religious leadership to civic leadership and trust betwee

No musician this side of Bob Dylan has been mythologized more than Bruce Springsteen Depending on who you talk to he is a modern-day Woody Guthrie a spiritual descendant of John Steinbeck or a would-be intellectual who reads William Carlos Williams on the tour bus The trick for those who consid