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?
Literature
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.
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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.
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Sheed & Ward: the unlikely power couple who revolutionized Catholic publishing
As readers mark the centennial of the Sheed & Ward publishing house, we celebrate what “the Sheedwardians”—as that unlikely Catholic power couple sometimes called themselves—meant back in their heyday.
Posted inIdeas
Dylan Thomas was a difficult person. But ‘Fern Hill’ is a perfect poem.
To understand this poem, you don’t need biography. Your own personal understanding of the loss of innocence and the pain of mortality serve just as well as Thomas’s disastrous attempts at adulting.
Posted inCatholic Book Club
Remembering Cyprian Davis, a giant of Black Catholic history
Cyprian Davis, O.S.B., was a prominent figure in the American church after the Second Vatican Council due to, among other achievements, his scholarship on Black Catholics, theology, spirituality, pastoral care, Black women religious in the United States and the multifaceted history of Black Christianity on these shores.
Posted inCatholic Movie Club
‘Train Dreams’ is about an ordinary life. But it points toward the extraordinary.
Based on a novella by Denis Johnson, ‘Train Dreams’ immerses us in the ordinary life of Robert Grainier in order to gesture at the extraordinary.