Everybody wants a piece of Flaubert His contemporaries Victor Hugo Ivan Turgenev Emile Zola Guy de Maupassant and others hailed his genius Twentieth-century critics from Erich Auerbach to Lionel Trilling ushered him into the pantheon of modernism Jean-Paul Sartre ground out five massive vol

Among the signal achievements of the Second Vatican Council is the Roman Catholic Church rsquo s irreversible commitment to the cause of Christian unity How did the church come to change its preconciliar triumphalist insistence on the ldquo return rdquo of ldquo schismatics and heretics rdquo

I first met John McGahern in the 1990 rsquo s when I was teaching a summer course in contemporary Irish literature for Georgetown students at Trinity College in Dublin where John was then residing He was one of the people I was hoping to entice to come to my class and when I asked him he agreed

Next year will mark 50 years since John S Dunne C S C fresh from writing a dissertation on Thomas Aquinas under the direction of Bernard Lonergan S J at the Gregorian University in Rome joined the theology faculty at the University of Notre Dame In those five decades he has published 16 boo

Years ago my husband and I spent a grim rainy day at the former Dachau Concentration Camp in southern Germany The museum rsquo s last exhibit in white letters against a black background was a single line from American philosopher George Santayana Those who forget the past are condemned to repea

I owe a great deal to Henri J M Nouwen His writing which I first discovered in the 1970 rsquo s helped clarify the spiritual life for me I continue to read and profit from his books and recommend them to others Oddly I felt a certain trepidation about this posthumous work on spiritual direct