“Miracle: The Boys of ‘80” aptly balances archival footage and contemporary reactions, offering an exciting sports documentary while also pulling on the heartstrings with its nostalgic tone.
History
Posted inPodcasts
The Black Masking Indians of Mardi Gras
This week, on a special Mardi Gras episode, “Jesuitical,” Ashley and Sebastian speak with Dr. Ansel Augustine about the harrowing and sacred culture of the Black Masking Indians of Mardi Gras.
Posted inBooks
Review: How the suburbs changed the church
Focusing on Long Island, in New York, Stephen Koeth’s ‘Crabgrass Catholicism’ traces the institutional adjustments that occurred as once-urban Catholic families took up suburban living after World War II.
Posted inCatholic Book Club
The legend of ‘The Pope’s Gorilla’: Archbishop Paul Marcinkus
By the late 1970s, Archbishop Paul Marcinkus was considered one of the most powerful figures in the Vatican—and certainly one of its most controversial.
Posted inArts & Culture, Books
Review: The ‘Scopes Monkey Trial’ and church-state tensions
Brenda Wineapple’s ‘Keeping the Faith: God, Democracy, and the Trial That Riveted a Nation’—about the famous Scopes “monkey trial,” is timely. Then again, church-state conflicts simply never go away in the United States.
Posted inBooks
Review: Rediscovering a forgotten theological force at Vatican II
With her new study of Marie-Dominique Chenu, O.P., Mary Kate Holman offers a major contribution to ressourcement scholarship and the history of Vatican II.
Posted inCatholic Book Club
Another year over, a new one just begun: ‘America’ on N.Y.E.
Over 117 years, the editors of ‘America’ offered plenty of advice and exhortations (and warnings) for New Year’s Eve…but also reminded readers always to have hope.
Posted inArts & Culture, Books
Review: Slavery and American Jewish history
The Jewish people in America have long punched above their demographic weight. Consider how deprived our science, music, letters, film and law would be absent the contributions of Abraham’s stock. Owing to this and all the discredited drivel about the American slave trade’s supposed Jewish hub, a fresh, thoughtful treatment of Jews and America’s original […]
Posted inArts & Culture, Books
Review: Elizabethan drama (and fiction)
In her debut novel ‘Lightborne,’ Hesse Phillips portrays a world of intrigues swirling around Christopher Marlowe and his London circle.
Posted inArts & Culture, Books
Review: The return of Thomas Pynchon
A kind of maximalist profusion of detail and incident characterizes ‘Shadow Ticket,’ though this new novel from Thomas Pynchon might also be categorized as zany neo-noir—or slapstick noir—for developing the noir tropes of the 1930s and 1940s in a less hardboiled, wackier direction.