Books

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

O K post-Christian we rsquo ve read our Nietzsche postmodern the MLA insists on it postcolonial goes without saying post-structuralist ho-hum but post-cultural Can Christopher Clausen an English professor at Penn State be serious Indeed he can First assume that culture in the old s

Living in an age of partisan politics one has need of a reminder that there was a time when cooperation and compromise defined our country rsquo s political life Irwin and Debi Unger call us back to examine that period of our country rsquo s history in LBJ A Life Not a sentimental or romanticize

Perhaps as Garry Wills states in his opening sentence Catholics have fallen out of the healthy habit of reminding one another how sinful popes can be Yet many Catholics I know have watched enough television to know that Julius II armor-clad led his troops into battle and that Paul III made his

The arguments for women rsquo s ordination to the diaconate have been circulating for a number of years indeed centuries What then is Zagano rsquo s original contribution to this important ecclesial discussion and debate In my opinion it is simply this She writes in a synthetic way for a new ge

quot To know Joan of Arc quot wrote Mark Twain in his fanciful yet earnest quot translation quot of her life in 1896 quot was to know one who was wholly noble pure truthful brave compassionate generous pious unselfish modest blameless as the very flowers in the fields nature fine an