I wonder if there is a new fascination for books about books especially those books we call classics Recently a group of sketches by Italo Calvino was published as Why Read the Classics Not long ago David Denby offered Great Books My Adventures With Homer Rousseau Woolf and Other Indestructib

John Cornwell rsquo s latest effort at faithful constructive criticism following his highly controversial Hitler rsquo s Pope focuses on the factions and divisions within Roman Catholicism that virtually every Catholic experiences to a greater or lesser degree In a brief first chapter A Catholi

William J O rsquo Malley S J has been teaching theology for the past 30 years and has written a score of books In the introduction to his newest Choosing to Be Catholic he identifies the audience he hopes to attract those considering or participating in the Rite of Christian Initiation of Ad

Of all the puzzles of existence that challenge our religious ideas, none cause more anguish and more crises of faith than suffering, death and evil. From the dawn of human sensibility these have resisted what Leibnitz called theodicy—vindication of the justice of God. Even today, many thinkers

We sometimes imagine that the besieged and occasionally violent form of religiosity known as fundamentalism is a uniquely Islamic trait. This is not the case. As Karen Armstrong has written, fundamentalism is a global fact and has surfaced in every major faith in response to the problems of modernit

Ever since I learned to read, I have wanted to be a fiction writer. The vocation was inchoate at first, for books seem as authorless as rain to a child, but it insisted that I not only inhabit the world imagined by others, as good readers do, but go on with the story, configure it to fit my own life

It was chilling to read, to see the pictures. The Sunday New York Times Magazine of Oct. 21 displayed a pictorial interview with five of Jihad’s Women, associated with one of the 100 Pakistan religious schools for Muslim females. (There are 10,000 such schools for boys in the country.)A woman

Different FindingsWhile I agree with the Rev. James Garneau’s basic premise in “More Priestly Fraternity” (10/22) that priests need and deserve communities of support, my own research and other studies on seminaries over the past 20 years would yield different findings on a number

In a trenchant article that appeared in The Atlantic Monthly in 1998, the Harvard theologian Harvey Cox argued that the God of contemporary culture was The Market. Think about it, wrote Professor Cox: The Market moves in mysterious ways, it is believed to be omniscient, it boasts its own caste of pr

Paterson, N.J., is not a place name likely to strike a chord of recognition in the minds of Americans elsewhere in the country. Literary types might recall that the poet-physician William Carlos Williams had his office there, and that one of his most famous poems is named after this once-prosperous