Maybe today—tonight—we should all take another look at “Earthset.” We need to feel anew a sense of identification with humankind and the planet as a whole.
Books
Posted inCatholic Book Club
Tracy Kidder, biographer of a broken world’s ordinary heroes
Tracy Kidder, who died last week at the age 80, wrote on everything from true crime to computer design to retirement homes to genocide to Vietnam to pioneering figures in the world of medicine. He also told stories of hope and inspiration in several of his books, including the monumental ‘Mountains Beyond Mountains.’
Posted inPodcasts
The inside story of Pope Leo XIV’s election
This week on “Inside the Vatican,” Colleen Dulle is joined by guest host Ashley McKinless for an interview with Gerard O’Connell and his wife and journalist Elisabetta Piqué about their new book, “The Election of Pope Leo XIV: The Last Surprise of Pope Francis.” They discuss pre-conclave maneuvering, including organized resistance to Pope Francis’s reforms, as well as their decision to report conclave details despite Cardinals taking oaths of secrecy.
Posted inBooks
Review: The Mets and the history of class and race in New York City
In ‘Metropolitans: New York Baseball, Class Struggle, and the People’s Team,’ A. M. Gittlitz fuses his interest in leftist sociopolitics with his love of baseball, or, rather, his very specific love of the Mets.
Posted inCatholic Book Club
‘Your homework is to tell someone you love them today’: Colman McCarthy’s lessons in peace
Colman McCarthy, who died on Feb. 27 at the age of 87, had a well-deserved reputation for seeking out the underdogs in life—as well as for his determined lifelong stands against war, capital punishment, homelessness and the other seamy sides of contemporary capitalism.
Posted inTheater
Separating the art from the artist? Broadway’s ‘Giant’ wrestles with Roald Dahl’s antisemitism
The tragedy of Dahl’s antisemitism isn’t that it colored his art but that it clouded his vision and tainted his outrage.
Posted inBooks
Review: Thomas More, God’s good servant
Joanne Paul wrote her powerful and considerable biography of Thomas More because she finds More’s life relevant to today’s world. But the book also addresses another question: Was More a saintly martyr or a vicious murderer?
Posted inBooks
Review: Seeking a healthy planet and a healthy church
In Christina Rivera’s new collection, we wander through waves of connections, an ebb and flow carrying us between climate change, the sixth extinction, motherhood, all kinds of oceans and personal challenges—including the writer’s desire to leave the Catholic Church she was raised in.
Posted inBooks
Review: A Jesuit high school whodunit
Anna Bruno’s ‘Fine Young People,’ set at St. Ignatius, an elite Jesuit high school in a Pittsburgh suburb, operates as a whodunit on multiple levels simultaneously.
Posted inBooks
Review: Parables of a Greenland priest
Henrik Pontoppidan’s ‘The White Bear’ gives us two novellas that work in conversation with each other. Both feature burly, uncouth protagonists who endure episodes of childhood trauma and develop a fiercely independent way of engaging with the world.