Catholic Book Club

Imagination is a powerful and creative human faculty. Ancient thinkers likened the imagination to a wax tablet. It is malleable. One’s experience can press upon the imagination and engender imprints, which one can shape further in reflection. Within our own tradition, the Spiritual Exercises o

Some years back, I enrolled in a graduate seminar in Analytic Philosophy. At the start of the first class, the professor posed the question—what makes you you? What is the core of your identity? If one were to teleport you through time and space, what part of you would need to be transferred s

Amazon currently sells a 5-volume, 3,020 page (11.6 lbs.) hardcover version of Thomas Aquinas’s Summa theologiae for $198.46. Before you go out to buy the set and strive to finish reading through the double columned pages before Labor Day, it would behoove you to read Bernard McGinn’s fi

In the 1980s, the American short story writer Raymond Carver penned a story called “A Small, Good Thing.” It is a haunting story that includes, at once, the death of a child and an ending that illustrates the hope of companionship: the breaking of bread together. The bread served to the

Over his lifetime, J. F. Powers published dozens of stories and two novels—the first at age 43 (April’s Catholic Book Club selection) and the second at age 71. Powers agonized over his second novel for 25 years. In a sense, Wheat That Springeth Green conveys the anguish of a writer tryin

What makes a priest or consecrated religious worldly? Is it care for finances or fundraising? Is it a taste for fine clothing, food and drink? Is it love of opera or devotion to televised sports? Does a worldly priest or religious simply mean an individual whose spiritual life collapses into a

Part II of the Discussion (Pages 165-463)Read Part I here.Three hundred and sixty-five years ago this month, Sts. Jean de Brebeuf and Gabriel Lalemant were killed at Taenhatentaron/Saint-Ignace following Iroquois raids on two Wendat villages (Saint Ignace and St. Louis). In 1949, 300 years after the

Part I of the Discussion (Pages 1-164)Read part II here.What is martyrdom? What is the difference between martyrdom and recklessness motivated by a desire to gain heaven? Does Tertullian’s claim, “the blood of martyrs is the seed of the Church,” inspire violence and the rash absorp

Augustine’s Confessions is the story of a soul. It is the account of a soul that once had a rigid, fairly intelligible story for itself. For some thirty years, Augustine told the same story of his soul—to himself, to others—until that story was torn up and reconstituted i

The word “someone” is indefinite and ordinary. It is a word that stands in for or anticipates another more vivid concept. It almost always denotes a person: “Someone will pick me up.” “Someone will know how to get there.” It is a subtle word that carries a great d