Books

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

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

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

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

Frank McCourt rsquo s impoverished youth in Limerick recalled so vividly and brutally in Angela rsquo s Ashes actually could have been much worse according to the acclaimed author rsquo s cousin ldquo When we were in Killarney industrial school rdquo Pat Sheehan tells the writer and documen

Early Christian history takes on a decidedly postmodern turn in this new-in-paperback work by the Cambridge classicist Keith Hopkins In style reminiscent in parts of Gerd Theissen rsquo s Shadow of the Galilean Christology in the form of a novel and Dutch Edmund Morris rsquo s biography of Ronal