Books

In this the third and presumably final volume of his Agnes Browne trilogy Brendan O rsquo Carroll sends poor Agnes off to heaven at the relatively young age of 60 All her living children and grandchildren are around including a son with whom she is reconciled at the last possible second Agnes h

In the first few decades of the 20th century a remarkable number of English writers chose to become Roman Catholics Joseph Pearce who has written biographies of G K Chesterton and J R R Tolkien traces this phenomenon in Literary Converts a book that is not so much a study of theology or li

Bertrand Russell once remarked that intellectuals like savages are apt to imagine magical connections between words and things Diane Ravitch rsquo s history of American school reform is a depressing demonstration of the truth in Russell rsquo s quip Left Back is a chronicle of the idiocies visit

I once had a close encounter with Alan Greenspan chairman of the Federal Reserve Board in a ritzy restaurant in Washington named Galileo I was being taken there by in-laws I assume Greenspan was paying his own way My main worry on seeing him was not the check but his meal This is a man whose ev

Before you begin to read The Sky Unwashed you think you know what you are in for Both jacket copy and preface explain that the novel deals with the Chornobyl nuclear accident The author born and raised in Chicago is a bilingual first-generation Ukrainian- American who has traveled often to Ukr

The United States has but one graduate program in canon law and many seminaries and theologates do not have a full-time canonist among their professors Much of the extensive U S research in canon lawwhich covers a broader spectrum of ecclesial concerns than the law governing the nullity of marria

Flophouse is greater than the sum of its parts That is it is far more than a book of striking photographs of Bowery men and their surroundings with brief accompanying texts Because the four Bowery hotels described in the book are among the last of their kind in New York City the book has an ele

What may even be worse than racism an African-American friend said not long ago is white guilt over racism He went on to quote everyone from Lenny Bruce and the Rev Martin Luther King Jr to W E B Du bois Racism was a problem yes but focusing on what is not being done to balance racial rel

Anyone who believes that modernity has quietly packed its bags and faded away under the weight of postmodernism needs to read John Thornhill rsquo s Modernity Christianity rsquo s Estranged Child Reconstructed Thornhill who is recently retired served as the head of the department of systematic t

Last spring I ran a seminar on the contemporary Catholic imagination in America and at the end I asked my students to write about their own religious imaginations One found a surprise she discovered she had a religious imagination But she shouldn rsquo t have been surprised everyone has onea se