Books

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Slowly over the past 25 years in the United States the old belief in free will has been replaced by a pseudo-scientific belief in determinism Faulty genes bad brain chemistry neurotransmitters gone bonkersthese are some of our postmodern excuses In American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

Combining archetypal psychology ecclesiology and ethics Eugene Kennedy in his latest book The Unhealed Wound sets out a disturbing vision of church malaise rooted in the distorted transference of sexual energy into power and manipulation Kennedy uses the analogy of the wounded Grail King of the

When Virginia Woolf published Mrs Dalloway in 1925 her fourth novel she set out to demonstrate what she thought was needed in modern fiction an examination of the interior of her characters the stream of consciousness that holds each of us together from moment to moment What did not interest

All too often significant court cases fail to arouse universal interest Confusing jargon and endless deliberations conspire to numb the public to these cases despite their importance The class-action suit known as Wilder which plodded through courts for 26 years could have been one of thema ca

R my Rougeau has written a fresh and surprising narrative about the monastic life It is a novel or perhaps a series of linked short stories But form is not what counts here The odd angle of vision is what makes this book worthwhile Rougeau rsquo s story deals with young Paul Seneschal a Canad