Books

Visiting friends in New England recently I listened to their lament about parish life Boring liturgies irrelevant homilies insipid musicall this from devout Catholics tempted to bolt to a local Protestant church for a feeling of community and worship It rsquo s a familiar scenario to most of us

Books on Jesus continue to sell In particuclar books on Jesus as a historical person have attracted a wide readership Much of the credit for this goes to the New Testament scholar Robert Funk who convened the Jesus Seminar as part of his admirable effort to make religion the fourth Ra matter of

David Lodge holds a special place among British novelists In certain ways he is heir to Evelyn Waugh as a Catholic writer with a mordant wit and concern for religion He is also an accomplished academic with half a dozen works of criticism to his credit No surprise then that the academy is a fr

With their eyes so set on heaven Protestant Evangelicals either are unconcerned about such earthly matters as politics or their vision of a world rooted in a literal interpretation of the Bible makes them move in right-wing circles As a result they are the strategic allies of dictators multinat

One of the more interesting and paradoxical characters in the debate over capital punishment is the person on the political right who attempts to combine the libertarian suspicion of the state with support for capital punishment Such a person like George W Bush or Ronald Reagan affirms that the

The more particular the focus goes one literary axiom the more universal its resonance Robert Frost rsquo s New England or William Faulkner rsquo s ldquo little postage stamp of Mississippi rdquo evoke worldwide response and admiration because the very palpability of their specific worlds will

The Jesuit John Dear once asked God for a sign Not only did he ask for a sign he gave God a timetable right now Heaven apparently was shaken The sign was granted immediately On the spot Dear was 21 at the time and only weeks away from entering the Society of Jesus Dear felt the best way to pr

In the era of air travel and bullet trains what most people understand by ldquo pilgrimage rdquo says Anne McPherson is ldquo a beeline trip to a distant goal rdquo She herself has lived by an older French notion ldquo walking to the saints rdquo For the pilgrims to the shrine of St Jam

This book is a not a history of Catholicism in Ulster as a religion but rather considers the Catholics of Ulster as a political and cultural identity Anyone who has spent any time in Northern Ireland knows that the confessional designation of Catholic and Protestant is shorthand for a specific and

On Jan 2 1882 Teddy Roosevelt burst into the Republican caucus room in Albany wearing a cutaway coat and carrying his silk hat and gold-headed cane His single eyeglass with gold chain over his ear and center-parted hair marked him as every bit the ldquo dude rdquo a rich playboy But he was n