Those of us of a certain age can sympathize with poor Cecily (Reese Witherspoon), a prisoner of grammar lessons taught by the indefatigable and assertively dull Miss Prism (Anna Massey). Oscar Wilde certainly did, when he put her in The Importance of Being Earnest. Yet those tedious days of Latin an

Jimmy Carter, who learned Spanish in the Navy, found a special use for that skill in 1969, when he was a state senator in Georgia. In that year he worked for some days as a Southern Baptist lay evangelist in a Spanish-speaking neighborhood of Springfield, Mass.In a speech at the University of Havana

With Popes and Politics Justus Lawler has written two books His first four chapters analyze recent works about Pope Pius XII and the Holocaust His final three chapters address issues of church renewal and reform So massive has been the devastation inflicted on the memory of Pius XII by Rolf Hochhu

I first began reading Ian McEwan when Black Dogs came out a decade ago subsequently I started collecting and reading all his novels Combining a shrewd narrative sense with acute psychology he often manages to pick subjects that push him and his reader into the borderlands of ordinary life where t

In 1998 just before he turned 50 Edward Gargan did what any normal Vietnam-era c o former Berkeley Ph D candidate in medieval Chinese history New York Times foreign correspondent and bureau chief West Africa India and Hong Kong and current Newsday Asia hand would do for a midlife sabbatical

If marriage is a source of sacramental grace, why are we as a church so uncomfortable about sex?

One can distinguish between two radically different approaches to making life choicesthe professional and the vocational. The professional approach is so familiar as to be a cultural commonplace. It has such primacy in personal power, economic currency and institutional warrant that it claims near m