Sinéad O’Connor’s provocative appearance on ‘Saturday Night Live’ 30 years ago drew cries of outrage. But was some of her anger justified?
Catholic Book Club
Posted inArts & Culture, Catholic Book Club
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.
Posted inArts & Culture, Catholic Book Club
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.
Posted inArts & Culture, Catholic Book Club
The God-haunted fiction of John Irving
John Irving writes characters who, like Flannery O’Connor’s American South, seem somehow God-haunted.
Posted inArts & Culture, Catholic Book Club
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.
Posted inArts & Culture, Catholic Book Club
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.
Posted inArts & Culture, Catholic Book Club
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.
Posted inArts & Culture, Catholic Book Club
Father Carl Kabat & the Plowshares Eight: What do we risk to speak the truth?
Father Kabat, who called himself “a fool for Christ,” spent more than 17 of his 88 years in prison for his activism against the U.S. nuclear weapons program. He died on Aug. 4.
Posted inArts & Culture, Catholic Book Club
How does a book reading turn into an attempted murder? The threat against Salman Rushdie has been decades in the making
A violent assault on a famous author revives an ugly history: the fatwa against Salman Rushdie.