Fintan O’Toole reflects on the last 64 years in Ireland—a time when Irish life was almost completely transformed.
Literature
Posted inArts & Culture, Catholic Book Club
A man for all seasons: Fay Vincent, baseball and America
When Fay Vincent Jr. resigned as the commissioner of Major League Baseball, he turned to the pages of “America” in his effort “to try to put all of the current mess in perspective.”
Posted inArts & Culture, Catholic Book Club
Theophilus Lewis: A Black Catholic convert who brought the Harlem Renaissance to the pages of ‘America’
Theophilus Lewis wrote hundreds of theater reviews for “America,” though he got his start as a critic for a magazine central to the Harlem Renaissance in the 1920s.
Posted inArts & Culture, Catholic Book Club
Jon Hassler put Catholics’ complicated fear around Vatican II into his novels
Jon Hassler wrote novels that examined with infinite compassion the lives of the residents of small-town Minnesota.
Posted inArts & Culture, Catholic Book Club
Larry Woiwode: farmer, author, Christian sage
For his novels, memoirs, biographies and collections of short stories and poetry, Larry Woiwode is considered by some critics to be one of the greatest American authors of the 20th century.
Posted inArts & Culture, Books
Review: Thomas Merton’s deep devotion to the Eucharist — and how it called him to radical love
Gregory K. Hillis tackles an argument that has long haunted Thomas Merton’s legacy: that Merton somehow was not a faithful-enough Catholic.
Posted inArts & Culture, Books
The Catholic case for eliminating nuclear weapons
Michael Krepon’s new book provides a key history of the times, events, organizations and people involved in the pursuit of a peaceful approach to national and global security.
Posted inArts & Culture, Books
Long before RBG, Justice John Marshall Harlan was the Supreme Court’s ‘great dissenter’
Peter S. Canellos provides us with a fascinating biography of a Supreme Court judge who was the sole dissenter in both the Civil Rights Cases (1883) and in Plessy v. Ferguson (1896), in which the court held that the Constitution established the separate-but-equal doctrine.
Posted inArts & Culture, Catholic Book Club
Mike Davis, Los Angeles and the sins of capitalism
For more than three decades, Mike Davis has offered clear and often stinging counterpoints to the prevailing vision of the “California Dream.”
Posted inArts & Culture, Books
Review: ‘The Agitators’ vindicates three women who ended up on the right side of history
In “The Agitators,” Dorothy Wickenden explores 19th-century intersections of class, racism and patriarchy through the lives of the escaped slave Harriet Tubman and the activists Martha Wright and Frances Seward.