Gregory K. Hillis tackles an argument that has long haunted Thomas Merton’s legacy: that Merton somehow was not a faithful-enough Catholic.
Books
Posted inArts & Culture, Books
The Catholic case for eliminating nuclear weapons
Michael Krepon’s new book provides a key history of the times, events, organizations and people involved in the pursuit of a peaceful approach to national and global security.
Posted inArts & Culture, Books
Long before RBG, Justice John Marshall Harlan was the Supreme Court’s ‘great dissenter’
Peter S. Canellos provides us with a fascinating biography of a Supreme Court judge who was the sole dissenter in both the Civil Rights Cases (1883) and in Plessy v. Ferguson (1896), in which the court held that the Constitution established the separate-but-equal doctrine.
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Review: ‘The Agitators’ vindicates three women who ended up on the right side of history
In “The Agitators,” Dorothy Wickenden explores 19th-century intersections of class, racism and patriarchy through the lives of the escaped slave Harriet Tubman and the activists Martha Wright and Frances Seward.
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Review: The hallmarks of Black Catholic spirituality in the work of Toni Morrison
The reader can see God in all areas of Toni Morrison’s characters’ circumstances—in the “magic,” in the pain and suffering, and in the call to healing and wholeness that leads to life.
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Review: Catholics and religious liberty in early American history
If Catholics wanted to be tolerated in the early years of the Maryland Colony, they had to prove their loyalty—first to the Stuarts, then to Parliament, then the House of Hanover and then the fledgling American republic.
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Review: Lawrence Ferlinghetti and the vocation of the poet
Neeli Cherkovski’s expanded edition of his biography of Lawrence Ferlinghetti is a book by “a poet who set out to celebrate another poet.”
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Review: Hip-hop’s divine blend of poetry, song and story
Alejandro Nava begins his formal analysis by situating hip-hop as something that “recovers the oral, rhythmic, and melodic nature of ancient scriptural transmission.”
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Something for everyone: Welcome to Spring Books 2022
America’s spring 2022 literary issue has a little bit of something for everyone—including the historian in each of us.
Posted inArts & Culture, Books
Review: Is it high time to reconsider our drug policies?
A Columbia professor comes clean about his casual drug use—and thinks the rest of us should think more about harm reduction than eradication when it comes to addictive substances.