From Edgar Allan Poe to Dean Koontz to Flannery O’Connor, America’s editors and contributors are not (always) afraid of some horror.
Catholic Book Club
Posted inArts & Culture, Catholic Book Club
The spiritual depths of Toni Morrison
Toni Morrison’s fiction conveyed much of the pain, sacrifice and trauma that exemplifies so much of the African-American experience—which is why it makes some white readers uncomfortable.
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30 years ago, Sinéad O’Connor ripped up a photo of JPII on stage. What should Catholics make of her protest today?
Sinéad O’Connor’s provocative appearance on ‘Saturday Night Live’ 30 years ago drew cries of outrage. But was some of her anger justified?
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Yes, J. F. Powers wrote about priests. But his real subject was America.
Powers’s chosen subjects—in cassocks or nay—are inevitably All-American, and his stories are careful studies of American mid-century life and ambition.
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God’s grump: The irascible Evelyn Waugh
Evelyn Waugh’s reputation has endured for almost a century as other novelists have fallen out of fashion. It wasn’t because everyone thought him a jolly fellow.
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The God-haunted fiction of John Irving
John Irving writes characters who, like Flannery O’Connor’s American South, seem somehow God-haunted.
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Unveiling the history of Black Catholic nuns: Shannen Dee Williams’s ‘Subversive Habits’
Shannen Dee Williams’s ‘Subversive Habits’ uncovers—with authoritative, painstaking scholarship—a great deal of what was hidden and some of what has been erased concerning white supremacy in the Roman Catholic Church.
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Do you love sci-fi and religion? You’re not alone.
Science fiction and religion might not seem like the most natural of bedfellows—but religion is usually a prominent theme in most contemporary sci-fi.
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The Catholic faith (and pessimism) of J.R.R. Tolkien
J.R.R. Tolkien’s fantasy world was in many ways a direct reflection of his understanding of reality.
Posted inArts & Culture, Catholic Book Club
Remembering Frederick Buechner, an American C.S. Lewis
With the death of Frederick Buechner earlier this month, the nation lost one of its most profound novelists—as well as a spiritual writer of great depth and range.