D. J. Waldie’s strikingly beautiful book in 1996 about what it was like to grow up in Lakewood, Calif., “Holy Land,” is one of many writings by this chronicler of Los Angeles’s past and future.
Literature
Posted inArts & Culture, Catholic Book Club
Remembering David Lodge, the ‘agnostic Catholic’ who captured the post-Vatican II zeitgeist
David Lodge’s novels—as well as his many works of nonfiction—made him an important figure in 20th-century British literature. He also captured well the angst of many lay Catholics in the aftermath of Vatican II.
Posted inArts & Culture, Catholic Book Club
A guide for Christmas reading—highlighting the Dickensian fiction of Oscar Hijuelos
Oscar Hijuelos’s ‘Mr. Ives’ Christmas’ doesn’t start out as a cheery story—but in the end, this parable of good will lost and good will regained is a perfect Christmas tale.
Posted inArts & Culture, Books
Two things can be true: Catholicism and feminism
Can you be a Catholic and a feminist? Julie Hanlon Rubio gives her answer in the introduction of her new book—in the form of a confident “yes.”
Posted inArts & Culture, Books
Review: Joyelle McSweeney mourns in verse
Joyelle McSweeney’s ‘Death Styles’—her 10th book across creative and critical genres—rewards our attention.
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.
Posted inArts & Culture, Catholic Book Club
Bishop John Cummins and the Catholic history of Oakland
Bishop John Cummins had a significant and lasting impact on the Catholic Church in his own diocese and elsewhere through his quiet leadership and ministry. He was a reminder to many of what Pope Francis meant when he called for bishops who are “pastors, not princes.”
Posted inFaith, Features
An atheist’s return to the Catholic Church: a story of death, love and meaning
From Nietzsche and Heidegger to Charles Taylor, Dostoevsky and the Gospels, one believer’s journey to faith.
Posted inArts & Culture, Catholic Book Club
John Banville: notorious literary esthete—and crime novelist
John Banville is surely the only crime novelist in recent memory who has won the Booker Prize and is regularly rumored to be in the running for the Nobel Prize in Literature.