David Lodge holds a special place among British novelists In certain ways he is heir to Evelyn Waugh as a Catholic writer with a mordant wit and concern for religion He is also an accomplished academic with half a dozen works of criticism to his credit No surprise then that the academy is a fr

With their eyes so set on heaven Protestant Evangelicals either are unconcerned about such earthly matters as politics or their vision of a world rooted in a literal interpretation of the Bible makes them move in right-wing circles As a result they are the strategic allies of dictators multinat

Books on Jesus continue to sell In particuclar books on Jesus as a historical person have attracted a wide readership Much of the credit for this goes to the New Testament scholar Robert Funk who convened the Jesus Seminar as part of his admirable effort to make religion the fourth Ra matter of

The Jesuit John Dear once asked God for a sign Not only did he ask for a sign he gave God a timetable right now Heaven apparently was shaken The sign was granted immediately On the spot Dear was 21 at the time and only weeks away from entering the Society of Jesus Dear felt the best way to pr

One of the more interesting and paradoxical characters in the debate over capital punishment is the person on the political right who attempts to combine the libertarian suspicion of the state with support for capital punishment Such a person like George W Bush or Ronald Reagan affirms that the

The more particular the focus goes one literary axiom the more universal its resonance Robert Frost rsquo s New England or William Faulkner rsquo s ldquo little postage stamp of Mississippi rdquo evoke worldwide response and admiration because the very palpability of their specific worlds will