Fintan O’Toole reflects on the last 64 years in Ireland—a time when Irish life was almost completely transformed.
Books
Posted inArts & Culture, Books
Review: Learning how to live in the presence of God from a Cistercian monk and bishop
The thrust of Bishop Erik Varden’s new book can be summed up in words preached on Pentecost Sunday: “We shouldn’t domesticate the Spirit. It comforts, but also devours.”
Posted inArts & Culture, Books
Review: Thomas Merton’s deep devotion to the Eucharist — and how it called him to radical love
Gregory K. Hillis tackles an argument that has long haunted Thomas Merton’s legacy: that Merton somehow was not a faithful-enough Catholic.
Posted inArts & Culture, Books
The Catholic case for eliminating nuclear weapons
Michael Krepon’s new book provides a key history of the times, events, organizations and people involved in the pursuit of a peaceful approach to national and global security.
Posted inArts & Culture, Books
Long before RBG, Justice John Marshall Harlan was the Supreme Court’s ‘great dissenter’
Peter S. Canellos provides us with a fascinating biography of a Supreme Court judge who was the sole dissenter in both the Civil Rights Cases (1883) and in Plessy v. Ferguson (1896), in which the court held that the Constitution established the separate-but-equal doctrine.
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Review: ‘The Agitators’ vindicates three women who ended up on the right side of history
In “The Agitators,” Dorothy Wickenden explores 19th-century intersections of class, racism and patriarchy through the lives of the escaped slave Harriet Tubman and the activists Martha Wright and Frances Seward.
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Review: The hallmarks of Black Catholic spirituality in the work of Toni Morrison
The reader can see God in all areas of Toni Morrison’s characters’ circumstances—in the “magic,” in the pain and suffering, and in the call to healing and wholeness that leads to life.
Posted inArts & Culture, Books
Review: Catholics and religious liberty in early American history
If Catholics wanted to be tolerated in the early years of the Maryland Colony, they had to prove their loyalty—first to the Stuarts, then to Parliament, then the House of Hanover and then the fledgling American republic.
Posted inArts & Culture, Books
Review: Lawrence Ferlinghetti and the vocation of the poet
Neeli Cherkovski’s expanded edition of his biography of Lawrence Ferlinghetti is a book by “a poet who set out to celebrate another poet.”
Posted inArts & Culture, Books
Review: Hip-hop’s divine blend of poetry, song and story
Alejandro Nava begins his formal analysis by situating hip-hop as something that “recovers the oral, rhythmic, and melodic nature of ancient scriptural transmission.”