Fiction moves us, engages us, finds for us truths we may not have recognized when first presented to us as fact. Fiction teaches us agility, the importance of leaping from word to meaning, and the pleasure that’s to be had in doing so.
Books
Posted inArts & Culture, Books
The time the Jesuits deleted a paragraph out of a Flannery O’Connor essay
Be careful when you’re editing famous writers!
Posted inArts & Culture, Books
Poet Robert Lowell’s ‘graced but damaged’ life
“It was no great surprise that Lowell threw himself into Catholicism and took his Catholicism to a psychotic extreme.”
Posted inArts & Culture, Books
A theologian targeted by the Vatican defends religious pluralism
“The church as a whole, cannot grasp the vastness of God,” Peter Phan argues.
Posted inArts & Culture, Books
A great Catholic avante-garde novel, and why it is surprisingly relevant today
Much like Virgil in the pages of Hermann Broch’s book, we need to decide almost daily what we stand up for and when—and what price we are willing to pay for our convictions.
Posted inArts & Culture, Books
Why Satan’s character in Paradise Lost is the original antihero
John Milton’s Paradise Lost (published in 1667) may be more relevant in our time than ever before.
Posted inArts & Culture, Books
From ‘Good Kid’ to ‘DAMN.’ Kendrick Lamar shows faith is constantly changing
Released in April 2017, “DAMN.” portrays Kendrick Lamar’s internal torment as he struggles with his faith.
Posted inArts & Culture, Film
‘Goodbye Christopher Robin’ shows the trauma behind the creation of ‘Winnie-the-Pooh’
“Goodbye, Christopher Robin” is a dramatic look at the life of the British writer A. A. Milne and his strained relationship with his son.
Posted inFaith, Vatican Dispatch
Pope Francis speaks candidly to the church in a new book of interviews
Pope Francis confessed that while he has “chutzpah,” “I am also timid.”
Posted inArts & Culture, Books
Can we overcome racism? Ta-Nehisi Coates grapples with white backlash to the first black president
‘We Were Eight Years in Power’ is a sort of “I told you so,” though Coates takes little pleasure in having to say it.