In ‘The Odyssey,’ Christopher Nolan gives us a sobering vision of civilizations that rise, collapse, but rise again.
Literature
Posted inTelevision
An unsung Jane Austen heroine: Mary takes center stage in ‘The Other Bennet Sister’
“The Other Bennet Sister” on BritBox places Mary Bennet in the spotlight and follows her own journey towards finding happiness.
Posted inBooks
JD Vance can tell a story of conversion. But of communion—not quite yet.
JD Vance’s story suggests he has taken from the church its beauty, its authority and its pedigree but the pews and the people in them he has largely left behind.
Posted inTelevision
‘The House of Spirits’: a sumptuous miniseries based on a classic Chilean novel
The series creators deserve credit for deftly compressing Isabelle Allende’s dense, sprawling novel into eight very watchable episodes.
Posted inCatholic Book Club
‘America’ magazine’s most compelling Fourth of July musings over the years
As we all prepare for the 4th of July, going through some of America’s past commentaries provides some curious glimpses of the preoccupations and hopes of other generations.
Posted inBooks
Beach reads, old faves and some seriously hefty tomes: The ‘America’ summer reading list
Some of our recommendations are great beach reads; some are serious history books; and one of them is an old encyclical, because Jesuits gonna Jesuit.
Posted inBooks
Review: A counternarrative to American religious history
Matthew Sutton’s ‘Chosen Land’ addresses American religious history as one of a luxurious pluralism—but he often crosses the line into a perhaps-overdone editorial voice that grates on the reader.
Posted inBooks
Review: The Big Apple in the 1980s
The New York that Jonathan Mahler describes in ‘The Gods of New York’ is unstable, vulgar and dangerous. But there is much more to the story of the city in the late 1980s.
Posted inBooks
Review: Going nuclear—or not
Two new books—’Return to Fukushima’ and ‘Nuclear Is Not The Solution’—lay out the perils and ugly history of nuclear power.
Posted inBooks
Review: Maritain’s artful scholasticism
Jacques Maritain’s thought can be intimidating to anyone without a strong background in theology or philosophy. But ‘The Christian Philosophy of Jacques Maritain’ can be a helpful introduction.