Books

The trial of Slobodan Milosevic dramatizes the new worldwide demand for accountability for public officials who violate internationally recognized human rights That demand is behind the international court and may soon be ratified by enough votes to make it operational worldwide These momentous ev

Dorothee Soelle is well known for her seminal book on suffering Entitled simply Suffering it provoked much-needed discussion on the relation of theology to suffering In the winter years of a long career as a theologian as an activist in peace and ecological movements as an opponent of every for

Empire Statesman begins appropriately enough by evoking the 1928 September night when a flaming cross greeted Alfred E Smith then governor of New York as his presidential campaign train entered Oklahoma When Smith is remembered today if at all it is for the virulent nativist outburst encount

Samuel Taylor Coleridge 1772-1834 believed that one of the great miseries of his time was that it recognized no medium between Literal and Metaphorical it ignored the symbolic Too many of his age still followed the lead of 18th-century writers philosophers who distrusted mystery and poets who d

Perhaps I should have known from the title that Robert Morgan rsquo s new novel is about faith Before I could reflect on the title and try to puzzle out a reference point for it I was caught up in the story Morgan is like that You leaf through a page or two and suddenly the narrative has swept y

When I learned that the subject of Garry Wills rsquo s latest book was Renaissance Venice my initial reaction was a mixture of surprise disappointment and pleasure Surprise because it seemed to stray far beyond his usual field of interest and expertise however broad that may be Disappointment

At first reading I thought Ronald Hill rsquo s tack toward poverty somewhat puzzling coming from someone whose specialty is social science and public policy I had expected many more statistical tables and analytic categories Basically through a compilation of data from those he interviewed and

Slowly over the past 25 years in the United States the old belief in free will has been replaced by a pseudo-scientific belief in determinism Faulty genes bad brain chemistry neurotransmitters gone bonkersthese are some of our postmodern excuses In American Exorcism however Michael Cuneo does

One of the most striking attributes of Harvard Divinity School professor and theologian Harvey Cox has been timeliness His first book The Secular City published in 1965 proclaimed the collapse of traditional religion to be a main hallmark of our era It generated controversy sold nearly a millio

In the first years of the 20th century Alois Alzheimer a German neurologist cared for a middle-aged woman with a marked personality change characterized by bizarre behavior and memory loss This woman died about five years after he first met her years characterized by an inexorable decline to a