In ‘Requiem,’ her fifth book, Virginia Konchan takes the sacred seriously. She’s jocular with her subjects, including God, yet in doing so she demonstrates sustained attention toward the divine. God is among her natural poetic vocabulary.
Books
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Decline and fall? Christian Smith on the demise of traditional faith
In ‘Why Religion Went Obsolete: The Demise of Traditional Faith in America,’ Christian Smith argues that traditional institutional religion has lost its grasp on America—at least among Americans under the age of 50.
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Review: The Catholic fragments of art, faith and sex in 1980s pop culture
Paul Elie’s ‘The Last Supper: Art, Faith, Sex and Controversy’ investigates pop culture’s crypto-religious, uncanny symbols of immanence and transcendence.
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Seamus Heaney’s hidden spiritual life
Two new books give a multi-hued portrait of Seamus Heaney as he pursued a late-20th-century vocation as a public advocate of poetry and as a somewhat private advocate of Catholicism as a folk culture.
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Review: The spiritual exercises of liberalism
In ‘Liberalism as a Way of Life,’ Alexandre Lefebvre argues that for secular people, liberalism, if practiced intentionally, can be the grace they are seeking in their ordinary lives.
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Review: Recognizing our lives as pilgrimages
in ‘Finding God Along the Way,’ Christine Marie Eberle masterfully weaves together Scripture, poetry and Ignatian spirituality.
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Review: Bridging the Catholic gap
In ‘Cultural Catholics,’ Maureen K. Day works to answer the question of who “cultural Catholics” really are—and how to connect with them.
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Review: Short stories about going nowhere fast
Jared Lemus’s robust, melancholy debut short story collection ‘Guatemalan Rhapsody’ gives us characters who strive for love, respect or mere survival in tales that unfold in Guatemalan towns or among immigrant communities in the United States.
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A book on ‘wokeness’ Catholic evangelizers need to read
In ‘We Have Never Been Woke,’ Musa al-Gharbi seeks to untangle competing threads of discourse around identity and social justice.
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Review: Who will shape fiction’s future?
In ‘Stranger Than Fiction: Lives of the Twentieth-Century Novel, Edwin Frank explores how reality has been presented and even transformed through the way it is molded in fiction—and how the novel evolved from the 19th century novel to that of the 20th century.