Books

The authorial tone of this delightful memoir is captured nicely in its subtitle ldquo A Baseball Valentine rdquo for its spirit as in a billet-doux reflects affection gratitude and recollection of the sweeter memories The main title The Last Commissioner coined by George Vecsey a sports rep

The debate over the compatibility of wealth and democracy is as old as the republic With this truism author and political commentator Kevin Phillips begins Wealth and Democracy From the start we have no doubt where the author stands on that issue Extreme inequalities of wealth he is certain end

From late January to June as the sexual abuse scandal raged across the nation and ravaged the church Catholics looking for a silver lining noted that the crisis had united erstwhile opponents in the Catholic culture wars With the bishops serving as convenient whipping boys for liberals and conser

From this evil-smelling spring of indifferentism flows the erroneous and absurd opinionor rather deliriumthat freedom of conscience must be asserted and vindicated for everyone Pope Gregory XVI rsquo s condemnation of religious liberty in the encyclical Mirari Vos 1832 was still official Catholic

Michael Lawler is the director of the Center for Marriage and Family at Creighton University in Omaha Neb and for the past 30 years has taught courses on marriage to Catholic students His publications on marriage and family span decades and include several books on marriage all informed by a c

In his new novel Umberto Eco semiotics professor and the author of a number of essays and novels offers a stylistic tour-de-force set in the latter part of the reign of Frederick Barbarossa Holy Roman Emperor from 1155 to 1190 The core of the novel is Baudolino mdash an unreliable narrator with

In The New Faithful Colleen Carroll a young journalist from St Louis offers a breezy tour through the lives of today rsquo s Protestant and Catholic young adults who practice a traditionalist form of faith They clamor for pre-Vatican II pieties embrace condemnations of abortion homosexuality

Feeling totally alone and undone by a lack of support within the Bush administration and just one week after Bush had nominated her as Secretary of Labor Linda Chavez withdrew Chavez explained that her opponents especially the A F L -C I O the Democrats and their various interest groups had go

Back in the 1960 rsquo s some angry radicals liked to call their country Amerika the k vaguely hinting that the land of the free and the home of the brave was in fact a cruel and alien place with a whiff or two of Nazism Really angry radicals sometimes spelled it AmeriKKKa Curiously enough En

This book like Richard Schoenherr rsquo s Full Pews and Empty Altars 1993 will be controversial His earlier work was a demographic study that identified the magnitude of the priest shortage and made projections about future trends Since the news was not good some criticized his findings and o