Books

In her preface to Critical Essays on Joyce Carol Oates published 24 years ago the author wrote Once a literary work is published it passes forever out of the private and protective world of the writer rsquo s imagination and out of his or her possession It cannot be reclaimed These passive-voi

If we want to know whether a person is good we should ask neither what his or her beliefs are nor what he or she hopes for Rather we should ask what the person loves So taught St Augustine He was in good company of course since Jesus summarized morality as ldquo love God and love your neigh

About 10 years ago the U S circuit court Judge John T Noonan published an article in Theological Studies on the problem of development in moral theology He focused on four issues on which it seems the Catholic Church had changed the content of its moral teaching These were usury slavery relig

Preaching to huge crowds in the 18th century the highly popular theologian Jonathan Edwards did not soften his rhetoric when it came time to describe the fate of humanity and its need for divine grace Natural men are held in the hand of God over the pit of hell They have deserved the fiery pit a

Maybe you don rsquo t have to believe This collection of 24 tales comes with an alternate subtitle Short Fiction on the Varieties and Vagaries of Faith and a fair number of its protagonists in works by Marjorie Kemper Joyce Carol Oates William Saroyan Isaac Bashevis Singer et al could hard

A professor I knew used to say Hamlet seems befuddled at times because he is a Renaissance man in a medieval world Over the years I saw that the reverse was equally true Hamlet knows the new philosophy but is troubled by new customs and friends who betray old loyalties he fails at playing the Ma

Fenton Johnson grew up in the shadow of Gethsemani Abbey in Kentucky the youngest of nine children born in a Catholic county surrounded by a Protestant sea For years his family home had been like a second home to monks from the abbey who walked over for conversation a beer or for some spare part

A question that looms large for many Americans these days after the second Persian Gulf war is ldquo How does a religion that claims universal and exclusive truth fit into a pluralistic environment rdquo Such is the question at the heart of George M Marsden rsquo s new work Jonathan Edwards