Features
Leonard Cohen’s imperfect covenant with others, lovers and God
Marcia Pally’s new book focuses on Leonard Cohen’s faith, relationships and worldview through his use of Jewish and Christian imagery.
‘We are all responsible together for what the church becomes’: Vatican II, synodality and the future of Catholicism
Kenneth Woodward interviews the Rev. Joseph Komonchak, the renowned scholar of the Second Vatican Council, on the council’s impact yesterday and today.
Books
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.
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.
Christopher Beha left the Catholic church and then came back. Now he’s writing a book about why.
Novelist and editor Christopher Beha discusses faith, writing and great literature with Mary Grace Mangano.
‘Talking Back to Dante’: A tribute in verse
Writing in honor of Dante and in conversation with him, Angela O’Donnell recognizes the enormous impact his imagination had on our worldview.
How Catholic Was Gustave Flaubert?
Gustave Flaubert’s prose reflects a lifetime of grappling with religious and spiritual themes. He saw his Catholicism as a singular form of asceticism, allied to his vocation as a writer.
In an age of insurrections and culture wars, Joyce and Faulkner are increasingly relevant
Faulkner’s Southern twist on Joycean modernism has made for popular reading in the wake of the U.S. Capitol insurrection and other spasms of red-state rage.
Review: The Pentecost of climate change
Katharine Hayhoe’s new book is a conversational, first-person narrative that melds the social science around climate change attitudes and communication into a framework and set of stories that readers can access and relate to.
Review: South Africa’s answer to William Faulkner
Using present tense, omniscient point of view and a William Faulkner-like stream-of-consciousness, Damon Galgut takes readers into the heads of every character in his new novel.
‘How to Read (and Write) Like a Catholic’: A guide to crafting authentic, faithful fiction
Does Christian literary expression hover as “something between a dead language and a hangover”? Have Catholic artists “ceded the arts to secular society”? In response to what might be considered a literary call to action comes a new book by Joshua Hren.
On the road again: William Least Heat-Moon’s ‘Blue Highways’ turns 40
Forty years after its publication, Jon Sweeney revisits ‘Blue Highways’ and its iconoclastic author.
Review: What would the great silent film clown Buster Keaton make of the smartphone era?
In “Camera Man,” the critic Dana Stevens uses the biography of the great silent film clown as a lens to explore the early days of movies, the cultural forces that gave them birth and the social upheavals they in turn engendered.
Poetry
The Angel Descends to Jakob
What man has made now makes him
The Angel Speaks
Most of my kind, when they come, take pleasure in blinding you
Last Take
I wrote the first full history of Black Catholic nuns in the U.S. Here’s what I learned.
Writing the first full history of Black Catholic women religious in the United States, Shannen Dee Williams experienced the gamut of human emotions.
Catholic Book Club
Wounds, Shadows and Dribbles: The Catholic Book Club’s latest reads
A novel, a memoir and a history of men’s Catholic collegiate basketball were the three latest selections for the Catholic Book Club.
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