James Dickey’s public persona of fighter pilot, champion athlete and hard-drinking woodsman who wrote of “country surrealism” gave him an everyman appeal, even as he was perhaps the nation’s greatest poetic talent.
Literature
Posted inArts & Culture, Books
Review: The story of Thomas Merton’s forgotten brother
‘Remembering the Forgotten Merton’ is a brief biography of Thomas Merton’s brother John Paul, whom Merton fans know primarily through the powerful elegy that Merton composed to mark his brother’s death as a fighter pilot in the Second World War.
Posted inIdeas, Politics & Society
Reading C. S. Lewis during the climate crisis
In “The Great Divorce,” C.S. Lewis paints a rich, multifaceted picture of the afterlife, one that could teach Christians quite a bit about life on Earth today.
Posted inArts & Culture, Catholic Book Club
Holy sinners and doubting saints: The fiction of Brian Moore
Despite his public antipathy toward Catholicism, a number of Brian Moore’s novels dealt subtly and deftly with the profound emotional impact of struggles with faith.
Posted inArts & Culture, Vantage Point
From 1999: Brian Moore’s Christ-Haunted Fiction
From Brian Moore’s earliest and best known novel, ‘The Lonely Passion of Judith Hearne,’ to his last, ‘The Magician’s Wife,’ the mystery of belief has haunted his best fiction.
Posted inArts & Culture, Books
Review: Contemplating death, eschatology and eternity
John E. Thiel of Fairfield University ventures to propose a “thick” eschatology based on the idea of a continuation of the human response to grace into an afterlife in ‘Now and Forever: A Theological Aesthetics of Time.’
Posted inArts & Culture, Books
Review: ‘Escape to Florence’ is a refreshingly apolitical novel in our hyper-politicized age
‘Escape to Florence’ stays within the bounds of its own story: the intimate and historical particulars of dual love stories, and the rich Italian backdrop against which both are set.
Posted inArts & Culture, Books
Review: August Wilson, a playwright of multitudes
In ‘August Wilson: A Life,’ an excellent new biography by Patti Hartigan, we read of the winding path that led Wilson to his ascendance, then delves into the tumults and triumphs of his two decades at the heights of achievement.
Posted inArts & Culture, Catholic Book Club
A sense of wonder: Remembering Brian Doyle
Brian Doyle’s essays, fiction and poetry all offered powerful reflections on finding the beautiful and the divine amid life’s struggles.
Posted inArts & Culture, Books
Remembering Thomas Merton—and his book that changed my life
‘The Seven Storey Mountain,’ a book whose 75th anniversary is celebrated this month, is widely considered a spiritual classic, and it continues to find new readers every year.