Emma Donoghue’s new novel unfolds over the course of All Hallows’ Eve, All Saints’ Day and All Souls’ Day—with a chatty cast of priests, nuns and philosophizing orderlies running about—adding to the sanctified air.
History
Posted inPolitics & Society, Short Take
Archbishop Coleridge: Catholic bishops can’t risk falling back on old tactics of political engagement
Hitler. Pinochet. Franco. The bishops have missed opportunities to stand up for democracy in the past. We can’t let it happen again.
Posted inArts & Culture, Catholic Book Club
When Thomas Jefferson rewrote the Bible
Peter Manseau, the curator of American religious history at the Smithsonian, offers his definitive description of Thomas Jefferson’s eclectic efforts to remake the Bible in the Catholic Book Club’s latest selection.
Posted inFaith, Faith in Focus
Ita, Maura, Dorothy, Jean: The legacy of 4 missionaries murdered in El Salvador 40 years ago
The four churchwomen chose to stay and to suffer, as St. Romero had once said, “the same fate as the poor.”
Posted inArts & Culture, Books
Los Angeles: a city of faith, beauty and pain
A longtime historian of Los Angeles explores and deconstructs the mythical city of boosters, developers and “perpetual reinvention.”
Posted inArts & Culture, Ideas
When Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (maybe) spoke with the dead
‘The root of Spiritism…is the diseased moral condition of the age,’ one Catholic author wrote.
Posted inFaith, Features
A Jesuit guide to pandemic ministry
Does canceling the sacraments show a lack of faith? Jesuits in the 16th century didn’t think so.
Posted inExplainer, Politics & Society
Explainer: Has it always taken this long to count every vote? Yes and no.
There is nothing unprecedented in recent decades about close presidential elections—in fact, they’re almost always close these days—and there is also nothing new in a delay in finding out the winner.
Posted inFaith, Faith and Reason
What Abraham Lincoln found reading the Book of Job amid civil war
What role does religion have to play for a leader facing his darkest hours? In the midst of civil war, in the valley of despair, Abraham Lincoln grappled with this question.
Posted inArts & Culture, Television
‘The Good Lord Bird’ Review: Ethan Hawke’s John Brown is a (heavily armed) holy fool
‘The Good Lord Bird’ runs straight to the heart of America’s most toxic contradictions.