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.
Books
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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.
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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?
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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.
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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.
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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.
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Review: Molly McNett and making the unsayable sayable
Molly McNett’s ‘Child of These Tears’ displays the difficulties of translation, the irreducibility of meaning, and the frustrating limitations of human nature and society.
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Review: Bennett Cerf, Random House co-founder and superstar editor
Gayle Feldman’s new biography of Bennett Cerf, ‘Nothing Random,’ is a window into the past of American literary culture.