ldquo In its field it is the best book ever written rdquo That was the most enthusiastic of the many enthusiastic assessments that greeted MacCulloch rsquo s book when it appeared in Britain last year It is an assessment with which I agree The book is a monumental achievement that takes readers

Diamonds and dross compete in this book all for a good cause The diamonds the sparkling poems of Gerard Manley Hopkins along with some less known but splendid prose The dross the preface introductions and commentary which are inaccurate overreaching and based on outmoded sources The good c

Now that the recent flood of books about the quest of the historical Jesus has subsided somewhat it seems inevitable that New Testament scholars should turn to the quest of the historical Paul Two new books about Paul represent serious attempts to write a scholarly biography of Paul and place his

ldquo Those who live for a time in Rome experience the church rsquo s age but also its youth They experience the church rsquo s breadth and diversity its religious and human wealth but also the limits and weaknesses of its representatives and members rdquo So writes the widely respected Germa

The urge to reveal ourselves to others is often stifled by prudence One of the rewards of writing novels is that the inner hidden self of an author can be mined brought to the surface and exhibited as fiction As the Joseph Conrad scholar Norman Sherry demonstrates in his authorized biography of

Charles Dahm a Dominican priest is more than qualified to write about parish-based Hispanic ministry Like many U S priests of the Vatican II generation his first passion was Latin America where he steeped himself in Spanish as a missionary in Bolivia On his return to the United States he comp