Books

Louis-Marie Chauvet professor of sacramental theology at the Institut Catholique in Paris is not widely known this side of the Atlantic His first work published in the United States Symbol and Sacrament A Sacramental Reinterpretation of Christian Existence caught the eye of many sacramental th

It was 1998 the Welfare Reform Bill had just passed and the writer Barbara Ehrenreich wanted to know how the four million women about to be booted into the labor market were going to make it on 6 or 7 an hour When the question came up over lunch with Harper rsquo s editor Lewis Lapham she sugge

In 1996 Jack Miles won the Pulitzer Prize for biography with a learned gripping semi-plausible flight of fancy Since the Hebrew Bible is doubtlessamong other thingsa collection of stories about a figure or figures Elohim Yahweh El Shaddai etc whom Westerners have agreed to call God Miles p

The Mountain of Silence is a personal search by a recently reconverted agnostic sociologist into the world of Orthodox spirituality Like most Western academics I associated the representative of institutionalized religion if not with narrow-mindedness intolerance and corruption then at least w

I wonder if there is a new fascination for books about books especially those books we call classics Recently a group of sketches by Italo Calvino was published as Why Read the Classics Not long ago David Denby offered Great Books My Adventures With Homer Rousseau Woolf and Other Indestructib

T C Boyle rsquo s collected short stories 1998 amply confirmed his impressive imagination and facility with language and narration In these 16 new ones nine of which appeared in The New Yorker in recent years Boyle again displays his ease in entering the minds of his principal characters and

John Cornwell rsquo s latest effort at faithful constructive criticism following his highly controversial Hitler rsquo s Pope focuses on the factions and divisions within Roman Catholicism that virtually every Catholic experiences to a greater or lesser degree In a brief first chapter A Catholi

William J O rsquo Malley S J has been teaching theology for the past 30 years and has written a score of books In the introduction to his newest Choosing to Be Catholic he identifies the audience he hopes to attract those considering or participating in the Rite of Christian Initiation of Ad

No lover of film could dislike this book No one will read it cover to cover at least at one sitting but you can take long ambles in it and come away deeply refreshed and richly informed Searching for John Ford is well researched and well written This is no small feat for often these two traits

Laurence Sterne was a novelist a clergyman and briefly a farmer in the rough-and-tumble 18th century an era when the remedy for cattle plague was thought to be a pint of gin for the cattle not for the beleaguered farmer In his letters sermons and above all in his comic masterpiece The Life a