Maurice Isserman the William R Kenan Jr Professor of History at Hamilton College in Clinton N Y has a well-earned reputation as a leading historian of the American political left His specialty has led him to explore the life of the socialist activist Michael Harrington (1928-89).
Books
Posted inArts & Culture, Books
A Writer’s Writer Remembers
Seven years ago in ‘Acts A Writer: Reflections on the Church, Writing and His Own Life,’ novelist Larry Woiwode interleaved his idiosyncratic meditations on Luke’s narrative of the first Apostles with his own story of giving up an English professor’s job in upstate New York.
Posted inArts & Culture, Books
A Changing Landscape?
Mike Davis is a lively and gifted writer of the left with the flair—even if often polemical—of a born journalist.
Posted inFaith
Mary of Nazareth: Friend of God and Prophet
What would be a theologically sound, spiritually empowering and ethically challenging theology of Mary, mother of Jesus the Christ, for the 21st century?
Posted inArts & Culture, Culture
Four Travelers’ Tales: Suggestions for Lenten Reading
Lent is just the right size. Forty days is enough time to get to know the desert and for most of us too little time to be swallowed by it. Guides are always welcome on the sometimes inconvenient, scary and unpredictable journey—including good books.
Posted inArts & Culture, Books
Behold the Mother
Is there a more remarkable spiritual writer today than Kathleen Norris And how full of paradoxes she is quot containing multitudes quot to take a leaf from Walt Whitman Coming from what she calls a quot thoroughly Protestant background quot her meditations have been both widely read and grea
Posted inArts & Culture, Books
A Disconcerting Thing: From October 4, 1997
John Updike’s reflection on faith and writing upon his reception of America’s Campion Medal in 1997.
Posted inFaith, Vantage Point
Greene in Haiti: From February 6, 1993
Graham Greene’s The Comedians is surely the most famous novel set in contemporary Haiti. The book, published in 1965, introduced the English-speaking world to the methods of governance of président-a-vie Francois Duvalier. Following the novel’s publication, both Greene and his book were banned in Haiti. Papa Doc was furious with the expose, certainly, but he was also vexed by the ethnographic detail of the novel. Trained as an anthropologist, the dictator knew that careful observers like Greene are always more difficult to discredit. Duvalier did his best, however, going so far as to produce a glossy bilingual pamphlet, Graham Greene Demasque, which depicted the writer as “unbalanced, sadistic, perverted … the shame of proud and noble England.” Although Greene would later term this assessment “the greatest honor I’ve yet received,” Duvalier was not joking. The Comedians, travelers to Haiti were warned, was a book that even the luggage-rifling thugs at the airport could recognize.
Posted inPolitics & Society, Vantage Point
The controversy over Salman Rushdie’s ‘The Satanic Verses’
From 1989: The controversy surrounding ‘The Satanic Mysteries’ is a paradigm of the difficulties that have existed over the centuries between Islam and the West.