Books

George Santayana should have warned us those who can remember the past but do so obsessively are just as condemned to repeat it as those who forget The 1999 Nobel laureate G nter Grass has been prophetically attacking and mourning the horrors of 20th-century German history since the publication

Randy Newman has a tune called God rsquo s Song That rsquo s Why I Love Mankind that can send a shiver down the spine of all believers even those who believe we would be better off without belief In it a malicious God sits in his heaven world-weary and sarcastic Man means less to me he says

In 1995 in Amazing Grace The Lives of Children and the Conscience of a Nation Jonathan Kozol opened a window on the rock-bottom housing health care and schooling of the Motts Haven enclave in the South Bronx His focus was on children facing the worst possible odds His purpose as declared in t

For Eugene Kennedy Cardinal Joseph Bernardin of Chicago 1928-96 is an exemplar of the paschal mystery ldquo Joseph Bernardin rsquo s life tells us what happens when a man accepts the destiny that is given to few on behalf of us who are the many to recreate the central motif of Christian spirit

Ernest Hemingway rsquo s famous comment about taking up a collection and sending John O rsquo Hara off to Yale once for all may have been a cheap shot but it was one O rsquo Hara rsquo s boorish streak nearly begged for In his unorthodox yet enlightening new biography Geoffrey Wolff makes the case

Pierre Toussaint was born a slave in Haiti on the B rard plantation known as L rsquo Artibonite According to the most recent chronology the year was 1781 The young Toussaint was spared the grueling toil of work on the fields His labor was in the household where he learned to read and write Fr

With clarity and candor Dean Hoge a professor in the department of sociology at The Catholic University of America in Washington D C and Jacqueline Wenger a graduate student and licensed clinical social worker communicate and interpret extensive data about generational changes in the priesth

The principal question this book addresses is hardly ever voiced in these words What do I have to believe in order to be Catholic Rather Catholics from all walks of life wonder about and struggle with the normativity of ecclesial doctrine by asking themselves and each other such questions as l

Margaret O rsquo Brien Steinfels has pointed out that the sexual abuse scandal so troubling the Catholic Church is more than a crisis about sexual abuse it is an ecclesiological crisis The crisis has generated various initiatives on the part of concerned Catholics among them Voice of the Faithful

Most of the time we think of the novel as a temporal art form Like music it begins and ends traversing the time between by way of a plot the plot determined to a degree by the characters whose fates are bound up with it But perhaps we can think of another kind of novel one that in emphasis at