Posted inBooks

Inundation or Interpretation?

Chapters 6 through 8 of the Book of Genesis tell how God in response to human wickedness sent a flood to wipe out the human race sparing only the righteous Noah and his family and the animals they gathered into their ark The biblical account interweaves two versions an older one conventionally

Posted inBooks

Wandering Between Two (Twenty?) Worlds

In Stanzas From the Grande Chartreuse 1855 Matthew Arnold famously agonized over being caught between two conflicting worlds a beloved but dead faith and whatever unknown but no doubt chilling forces that would replace it Compared with the complex predicaments facing Yezad Chenoy and other ch

Posted inBooks

Power for Power’s Sake?

The fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 signaled the end of the policy of containment that had guided American foreign policy during the cold war Some commentators declared the Soviet demise to be the end of history and faulted presidents George H W Bush and Bill Clinton as bunglers They missed an e

Posted inBooks

Hooray for Whom?

If history is bunk any history of the Oscars is full of it We all know designation as Best Picture hardly means a film was the best movie of the year As Emanuel Levy readily concedes in All About Oscar Hollywood rsquo s decision making has always been flawed and as he details in some excellent

Posted inBooks

A Gospel for Living

Brennan Manning describes himself as a vagabond evangelist Author of 11 books he leads spiritual retreats in the United States and Europe His life story reads like a catalog of been there done that A former Franciscan a former Roman Catholic priest a formerly married man a recovering alcohol

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A Universal Call

John Haughey rsquo s m tier is giving new life to moribund theological terms or those worn threadbare by overuse He strips terms bare reconstitutes them and then often stuns us with the precision of a polished and sometimes newly minted vocabulary The starting point and purpose of Haughey rsquo s

Posted inBooks

Our Earliest Feminists?

After completing a story on the Catholic nuns rsquo pension fund in 1986 and being intrigued by the lives and contributions of American Catholic sisters John J Fialka began work on the book Sisters Catholic Nuns and the Making of America Fialka a reporter for The Wall Street Journal rsquo s W

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Woman and the Word

In his foreword to Finding the Treasure Within A Woman rsquo s Journey into Preaching the spiritual author Ronald Rolheiser O M I writes We are forever caught up in situations that are less than ideal full of tension and fraught with potential for self-pity and bitterness So what can we

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Outmaneuvering the Bureaucrats

More words are misused in politics than in any other field of human endeavor Radical has come to mean something like extremist through repeated misapplication but it comes from the Latin radix meaning root radical politics is therefore supposed to be just another term for grass-roots activism Mi

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Apologista Extraordinario

American Catholics old enough to remember Bishop Fulton J Sheen and his famous chalk talks on televisionsermonettes punctuated by occasional salvos against Communism psychoanalysis and birth controlwill be stunned by how much more worldly engaging and hip apologetics can be in the hands of a maes

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