The church needs Madeleine Delbrêl’s words and example to transform our vision of one another, whether across ecclesial lines or simply across the subway aisle.

We have found at the Catholic Book Club that different genres and authors inspire different readers and broad variations in discussion, another reason to mix it up a bit in terms of genres and styles. Our two most recent selections have been no exception.

Jim Forest's memoir functions as both a personal history and a snapshot of a tumultuous era in American society—the 1960s—when Forest solidified his opposition to unjust war and his faith in active nonviolence.

He is most well known for inventing the light bulb and the phonograph, but Thomas Edison patented 1,093 "machines, systems, processes, and phenomena.” In 1881, Edmund Morris writes, Edison was “executing, on average, one new patent every four days.”

At the start of their correspondence, Flannery O’Connor was the gifted student and Caroline Gordon was the seasoned, exacting teacher.

The fiction of Catholic writers (and their lapsed Catholic brethren) has been described as "an invitation to mystery, not mastery, to communion, not control."