Books
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August 15-22, 2016
Parents should know where their children are not only physically but “existentially,” says Pope Francis in “The Joy of Love,” and he calls for a church that goes out to the “existential peripheries.” Whether he read the major figures of the movement chronicled by Sarah Bakewell or not, he was influenced by them as a young Jesuit in the mid-20th century.
Bakewell read the existentialists in the 1980s, when they were already...
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August 15-22, 2016
In the final chapter of Joan Chittister: Her Journey From Certainty to Faith , Joan Chittister, O.S.B., advises religious communities to ponder the following questions about the future of religious life: “Is there energy of heart shining out of the eyes there? Is there a pounding commitment to a wild and unruly gospel there? Is the spiritual life aglow there? Is there risk there? Is there unflagging commitment, undying intensity, unequivocal determination to be what...
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August 15-22, 2016
Step back to a town with a sizable Roman garrison holding the eastern front along the Euphrates River in the early to mid-third century of the Christian Era. Who would not jump at the chance to accompany the catechumen Isseos through the sacred rites of Christian baptism? Or to wonder about others whose names appear connected to the artistic decoration of the baptistery? We meet a soldier named Pontus who commissioned a David slaying Goliath, and a woman...
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In the academic world, it sometimes seems untoward for religion scholars to be enthusiastic about religion. It’s fine for specialists in the social sciences or arts to revel in some particular school of thought. But, it seems to me, a certain distance is expected from the religious studies expert—to view the subject of the transcendent as an entirely human construct.
In his new book History and Presence , the historian Robert A. Orsi argues for an approach to...
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August 1-8, 2016
David Means, the author of four critically acclaimed collections of short stories, has written his first novel, and it is a tour de force of imagination. Freudian psychology, de-centered Vietnam vets and nonsensical bureaucratic language are rich ores for a novelist to mine. In particular, the languages of bureaucrats and stoners, entwined with one another, set up a hilarity that is almost joyful until we realize how soaked in menace the story is. We may...
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August 1-8, 2016
Another character-driven novel by Jonathan Franzen, Purity proposes a system in which morality is a performance and a frustration of desire. His newest book was highly anticipated after the success of The Corrections (2001), which won the National Book Award, and the highly praised Freedom (2010). Since Corrections Franzen has worn all the laurels as the darling of American letters. The hype is well deserved, though, as he continues the tradition of the large...
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August 1-8, 2016
Thanks to Isadore Nikunge, I can attest to the power of international perspective when it comes to troubling moral issues.
In the early 1960s, Isadore was a foreign exchange student at Fordham University. He had come from Kenya (the actual Kenyan nation, not the State of Hawaii). Our family, living two blocks west of Fordham, befriended him.
At the time, folks like Malcolm X were bluntly...
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July 18-25, 2016
W hen my brother Dave and I were very young our father, a journalist who, probably because he couldn’t afford college, had gone right into newspaper work when he returned from World War I, would grow agitated when he saw us reading comic books. I remember him saying he had read all of Dickens and James Fenimore Cooper when he was young. He may have exaggerated on “all” of Dickens, but his library attested that he read voluminously. I keep a dozen of his own...
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July 4-11, 2016
I sometimes think that the most meaningful difference between Catholic novelists today and half a century ago (when Greene, Percy and O’Connor ruled the literary roost) is, well, very little. Those writers were not interested in being labeled with their religious tradition (except for Flannery O’Connor, who even called herself a “thoroughly Christianized novelist” in a late essay); neither are Alice McDermott and Christopher Beha today....
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July 4-11, 2016
Ever since President Bill Clinton implemented his plan to “end welfare as we know it” in the 1990s, low-income households have found it increasingly difficult to pay their rent. Welfare payments have barely budged in the last 25 years, while housing costs have soared. As successive administrations have adopted “tough on crime” laws and skimped on cash payments to the poor, incarceration has come to define the lives of black men, and eviction has shaped the...