Readers of Dave Barry’s latest, ‘Class Clown: The Memoirs of a Professional Wiseass: How I Went 77 Years Without Growing Up,’ will find enjoyable excerpts from many of his most notable columns, surrounded by additional memories, commentary and, occasionally, the perspective of hindsight.
Books
Posted inArts & Culture, Books
Review: Virginia Konchan, a poet of miracles
In ‘Requiem,’ her fifth book, Virginia Konchan takes the sacred seriously. She’s jocular with her subjects, including God, yet in doing so she demonstrates sustained attention toward the divine. God is among her natural poetic vocabulary.
Posted inArts & Culture, Books
Decline and fall? Christian Smith on the demise of traditional faith
In ‘Why Religion Went Obsolete: The Demise of Traditional Faith in America,’ Christian Smith argues that traditional institutional religion has lost its grasp on America—at least among Americans under the age of 50.
Posted inArts & Culture, Books
Review: The Catholic fragments of art, faith and sex in 1980s pop culture
Paul Elie’s ‘The Last Supper: Art, Faith, Sex and Controversy’ investigates pop culture’s crypto-religious, uncanny symbols of immanence and transcendence.
Posted inArts & Culture, Catholic Book Club
A relic of America magazine’s Jesuit patron, Edmund Campion
The patron saint of ‘America’ is Edmund Campion, S.J.—for several different reasons.
Posted inArts & Culture, Books
Seamus Heaney’s hidden spiritual life
Two new books give a multi-hued portrait of Seamus Heaney as he pursued a late-20th-century vocation as a public advocate of poetry and as a somewhat private advocate of Catholicism as a folk culture.
Posted inArts & Culture, Catholic Book Club
Walter Brueggemann: A scholar of the prophets—and a prophetic voice
Walter Brueggemann’s influence in the academy reached across denominations and traditions.
Posted inArts & Culture, Film
Review: In ‘The Life of Chuck,’ every person contains a universe
How much does any one individual person matter, considered against the grand sweep of history and the cosmos? That’s the question that writer-director Mike Flanagan considers in his new film “The Life of Chuck.”
Posted inArts & Culture, Catholic Book Club
David Tracy was more than a theologian
The Rev. David Tracy, who died on April 29, was a monumental figure in American Catholicism, renowned as a teacher, scholar, writer and mentor to thousands of theologians.
Posted inArts & Culture, Culture
Dungeons & Dragons—and Jesuits
Unexpectedly, Dungeons & Dragons has become a beloved activity among men preparing for religious life.