In “Sister, Sinner: The Miraculous Life and Mysterious Disappearance of Aimee Semple McPherson,’ Claire Hoffman delivers with a fast-paced page turner on the life of Aimee Semple McPherson. This biography brings into print another review of the achievements and personal failures of this major pioneer of media evangelism.
Literature
Posted inArts & Culture, Books
Review: Dave Barry gets away with it
Readers of Dave Barry’s latest, ‘Class Clown: The Memoirs of a Professional Wiseass: How I Went 77 Years Without Growing Up,’ will find enjoyable excerpts from many of his most notable columns, surrounded by additional memories, commentary and, occasionally, the perspective of hindsight.
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Review: Virginia Konchan, a poet of miracles
In ‘Requiem,’ her fifth book, Virginia Konchan takes the sacred seriously. She’s jocular with her subjects, including God, yet in doing so she demonstrates sustained attention toward the divine. God is among her natural poetic vocabulary.
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Decline and fall? Christian Smith on the demise of traditional faith
In ‘Why Religion Went Obsolete: The Demise of Traditional Faith in America,’ Christian Smith argues that traditional institutional religion has lost its grasp on America—at least among Americans under the age of 50.
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Review: The Catholic fragments of art, faith and sex in 1980s pop culture
Paul Elie’s ‘The Last Supper: Art, Faith, Sex and Controversy’ investigates pop culture’s crypto-religious, uncanny symbols of immanence and transcendence.
Posted inArts & Culture, Catholic Book Club
A relic of America magazine’s Jesuit patron, Edmund Campion
The patron saint of ‘America’ is Edmund Campion, S.J.—for several different reasons.
Posted inArts & Culture, Catholic Book Club
Walter Brueggemann: A scholar of the prophets—and a prophetic voice
Walter Brueggemann’s influence in the academy reached across denominations and traditions.
Posted inArts & Culture, Catholic Book Club
David Tracy was more than a theologian
The Rev. David Tracy, who died on April 29, was a monumental figure in American Catholicism, renowned as a teacher, scholar, writer and mentor to thousands of theologians.
Posted inArts & Culture, Catholic Book Club
Father sleuths best: Why priest-detectives make for good fiction
The genre of the crime-solving priest or religious might be a niche one, but it’s been around on the page and the screen for more than a century.
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Review: The spiritual exercises of liberalism
In ‘Liberalism as a Way of Life,’ Alexandre Lefebvre argues that for secular people, liberalism, if practiced intentionally, can be the grace they are seeking in their ordinary lives.