Symbolic landscapes shift during the years. For a century or more, starting perhaps with Mark Twain, American writers have looked to the South as a metaphor for failed expectations and ruinous nostalgia. William Faulkner and Tennessee Williams, Flannery O’Connor, Thomas Wolfe, Walker Percy and

God is a multiple choice quiz. Which God will we choose? One turns nosy old women into pillars of salt, slips serpents down the togas of Egyptians and sets Satan loose on his best friend just to see how he will stand up under the boils and windy advice of neighbors. Another rains down Wonder Bread i

In October 1927, with the release of “The Jazz Singer,” sound movies became commercially viable. In October 1929 the stock market crashed. Strange as it seems, the two events are closely related in cultural history. During the final two years of the boom, the movie industry had the money

Imagine one of those unspeakably beautiful September mornings in New York, with sunlight shouldering its way across the East River, nudging the bridges and skyscrapers and striding into the concrete canyons of Lower Manhattan. The air itself energizes office workers pouring into Manhattan from Queen

‘Is there any place on campus where they recite the Liturgy of the Hours?” The two undergraduates who popped into the sacristy after one of those tiny mid-morning, midweek gatherings for Eucharist in a university chapel took me by surprise. Why would two young women want to squeeze one m

Not long ago a distant cousin, a genealogy buff, sent me an antique clipping from a local paper about a possible ancestor on trial for murder. In the labor wars of the 19th century, scabs did not have much longevity in the Irish factory towns of the Middle West. This long-forgotten enforcer simply p