Books

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

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

Alice McDermott rsquo s fiction like William Kennedy rsquo s is to be praised if for no other reason than that it transcends the tradition of Irish-American fiction established by James T Farrell back in the 1930 rsquo s Since Studs Lonigan first swaggered onto the literary stage Irish-America

A few years ago the Episcopal bishop of Newark John Shelby Spong penned a book entitled Why Christianity Must Change or Die Spong argued that Christianity would inevitably decline unless it abandoned much of its traditional belief system A few decades hence we may regard Spong rsquo s prediction

For an on-the-ground feel for the Holy Land and the high stakes it holds for the world rsquo s three great religions Judaism Christianity and Islam Bruce Feiler rsquo s book Walking the Bible is the next best thing to being there The journalist-author takes readers on a guided tour of the first

At a time when the news is saturated with stories about corporate malfeasance it is salutary to recall that the corporate quest for profits can sometimes lead to injury and death In Five Past Midnight in Bhopal Dominique Lapierre and Javier Moro resurrect the story of Bhopal India where in 1984

Winston Churchill is defined by historyhe studied it he wrote it and he made it While the notion that great men shape the course of human events is somewhat outmoded among professional historians Churchill transformed Britain rsquo s darkest hour in 1940 into its finest Inspiring Britons with hi

The Common Good and Christian Ethics by David Hollenbach S J deserves to be the most read work of American Catholic public philosophy since the late John Courtney Murray rsquo s We Hold These Truths published in 1960 Both Murray and Hollenbach point to pluralism as a given The problem each i

Very likely the first question that will pop into the minds of readers of this latest and third book by Jacques Dupuis on the theology of religions is this How well has its author answered the charges by the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith that his previous work Toward a Christian Theo

What are public issues What organizations are best prepared to address them Do we have a welfare problem or a poverty problem Is education a concern because of failing schools or failing social equity These important questions have become increasingly perplexing especially if we consider the cen