The novelist Iris Murdoch died only two years ago at the age of 79, but already a memoir, film and biography have appeared to preserve her memory for devoted fans and to introduce her to new audiences. In Iris Murdoch: A Life, Peter J. Conradi offers a wide-ranging look at the life of a writer and philosopher who had a remarkable “hunger for the spiritual in a post-theistic age.”

Its name evokes peace but Jerusalem is a city in constant turmoil where controversy often turns deadly In 1996 when Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu opened the Hasmonean tunnel under the Haram al Sherif the Muslim sanctuary above the Temple Mount more than two weeks of hard fighting between P

Sin is the hardest thing in the world to explain but the easiest thing to demonstrate When we pray Forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us we only rarely sense the mystery within these words the enormity of the suffering that sin engenders and the possibility of he

The intent of the authors of Passionate Uncertainty Inside the American Jesuits would seem to be clear from the title Given the relatively uncomplicated prospect of gathering data from a random sample of current Jesuits and from the vast array of documents that guide the direction of the Society o

From that moment in October 1919 when his doctor cried My God the President is paralyzed until his last meeting with his cabinet in March 1921a meeting at which he could neither control his tears nor walk steadily even with his caneWoodrow Wilson rsquo s every word gesture and act was directed b

Umberto Eco is that relatively rare phenomenon a public intellectual who plies his specific academic trade as a semiotician but also ventures beyond the ivy cover to pronounce on public issues and to play the critic He is also of course a successful novelist who in The Name of the Rose may have