Books

Not long ago a friend asked if I could recommend a good book on Ignatian spirituality He was an intelligent college-educated young man interested not simply in deepening his prayer but more specifically learning about what could be called the specifics of the way of Saint Ignatiusfor example t

For many years Jonathan Kozol has attended to school children in impoverished neighborhoods The author of several award-winning books including Death at an Early Age and Amazing Grace he has taught those boys and girls observed them carefullyand in some instances has come to know them well outsi

The Chinese had no pocketsno place to carry quot a pocket-comb a folding foot-rule a cork-screw a boot-buttoner a pair of tweezers a minute compass a folding pair of scissors a pin-ball a pocket-mirror a fountain pen quot or any other such American-made product Moreover the Chinese we

Daniel Berrigan well-known poet and activist has picked up yet another one of the biblical books and has turned his socially sensitive creative eye onto its message As he did in his volumes on the books of Daniel and Jeremiah he creatively engages the text instead of analyzing it and he allows

My mother in an unusually arch moment once proffered a solution to all the church-state debates about Christmas cr ches on public squares Take the clothes off the Wise Men she said That way they could get an arts award Jane Alexander former head of the National Endowment for the Arts likes w

Memoirists rule the literary roosts these days but sometimes with a bad conscience Shouldn rsquo t they be writing poetry or at least novels if they are serious writers Isn rsquo t this retailing of their personal lives a knock-off item or maybe even a cheat a pretense of authenticity undercut

If one is looking for a book on grief and grieving based on lived experience rather than more remote psychosocial theories then Thomas Attig rsquo s How We Grieve is the resource to read Although it is not a brand new book first published in 1996 in this reviewer rsquo s opinion no book publish

Wags in the divinity school at the University of Chicago used to love retelling the joke about someone who tries to call Professor Martin Marty rsquo s office and gets the following response from Marty rsquo s secretary quot Could you hold on for about a minute and a half while Professor Marty fin

The debate over globalization is heating up not only in the streets of Seattle and Washington D C and the halls of Congress but among academics journalists and writers on public affairs A major contribution is A Future Perfect written by two veteran reporters for The Economist As is to be ex

It could be argued that fundamentalism is a serious contemporary problem that affects all aspects of society and will likely influence all cultures for the foreseeable future Such is in fact Karen Armstrong rsquo s assumption Her book makes an attempt to understand the development of fundamentali