One wonders: If the “red wolf” of lupus had not ended Flannery O’Connor’s life at age 39, what would the author be writing about in 2025? What might she think of what was being written about her?
History
Posted inArts & Culture, Books
Review: Percival Everett revisits Huck Finn
In his 2024 National Book Award-winning novel, ‘James,’ Percival Everett grapples with philosophical and metaphysical questions as well as racial issues, while enveloping all in sarcasm and irony.
Posted inFaith, News Analysis
Bishop Budde, Trump and the history of faith leaders getting political
The Catholic Church has its own history of prophetic voices using the moral authority of the priesthood to remind political leaders of the Christian precept of human dignity.
Posted inArts & Culture, Books
Review: Doris Kearns Goodwin looks back on the ’60s—and the love of her life
Doris Kearns Goodwin’s “An Unfinished Love Story: A Personal History of the 1960s” centers on the unique history found by going through her and her husband Dick Goodwin’s boxes of writings and memorabilia from his five-decade career in American politics.
Posted inArts & Culture, Books
Review: Opus Dei, inside and out
In ‘Opus,” Gareth Gore examines many seminal moments in the history of the controversial Catholic group Opus Dei, arguing that its secretive ways have allowed it to cover up serious scandals.
Posted inFaith, Features
England’s ‘Catholic Moment’: What can the history of British converts tell us about American Catholics?
As our own cultural moment in the United States has included some prominent conversions to Catholicism, what might we learn from some of the more prominent converts in British Catholic history?
Posted inArts & Culture, Film
A Bob Dylan nerd reviews ‘A Complete Unknown’
As a young Bob Dylan in “A Complete Unknown,” Timothee Chalamet captures some of the iconic singer’s enigmatic yet magnetic personality.
Posted inArts & Culture, News
Ten Commandments tablet, said to be 1,500 years old, goes up for auction
Sotheby’s is facilitating the sale of what it says is an approximately 1,500-year-old tablet, which it describes as “the only complete tablet of the Ten Commandments still extant from this early era.”
Posted inArts & Culture, Books
Frantz Fanon is having a moment
With his new biography, ‘The Rebel’s Clinic: The Revolutionary Lives of Frantz Fanon,’ Adam Shatz seeks to give us Fanon the person, and not just his most famous soundbites.
Posted inArts & Culture, Books
Review: Eamon Duffy on Peter Ackroyd’s ‘The English Soul’
Peter Ackroyd declares at the outset of ‘The English Soul: Faith of a Nation’ that Christianity has been “the reflection, perhaps the embodiment of the English soul.” But his book is not about Christianity so much as it is about some notable figures in Protestant England.