Back in 1978 on the way to his bar mitzvah a funny thing happened to Jeffrey Goldberg now Washington correspondent for The New Yorker he started to become a passionate Zionist His assimilated secular left-wing and soon to be divorced parents thought they could avoid the predictable alrightn

A gem among the sayings of the desert fathers has Abba Lot coming to Abba Joseph and saying As much as I am able I keep my little rule and my fast my prayer meditation my contemplative silence And as much as possible I strive to keep my thoughts clean What more should I do The elder monk ros

In future years when the history of our lagging environmental consciousness is written there may well be a special place devoted to the work of Thomas Berry.

E M Forster wrote in Aspects of the Novel 1927 that fantasy asks us to pay something extra that is first to accept the fantasist 8217 s impossible story as a whole and second to accept the specific beings say fairies and events say miracles that are in it Those who can do this howe

These nine tales show sons no longer connecting with mothers, mothers no longer close to their sons. A grand storyteller, Colm Tóibín uncovers dark truths about family relationships in today’s Ireland and, in a long final story, in Spain’s Catalonia.

The cover for this delightful collection of interconnected essays is the famous photo taken in 1932 of 11 ironworkers enjoying a relaxed lunch break as they sit side by side perched on an I-beam a thousand feet up in open space overlooking mid-Manhattan their legs nonchalantly dangling from the sk