Many academics seem to have the paranoid conviction that like Rodney Dangerfield they get no respect surrounded as they are by yahoo students apparatchik administrators Babbittish trustees and a clueless public that takes them for tenured radicals overpaid slackers summers off sabbaticals

Maybe you don rsquo t have to believe This collection of 24 tales comes with an alternate subtitle Short Fiction on the Varieties and Vagaries of Faith and a fair number of its protagonists in works by Marjorie Kemper Joyce Carol Oates William Saroyan Isaac Bashevis Singer et al could hard

Hans K uuml ng b 1928 may well have been the 20th century rsquo s most important Catholic theologian mdash not the most original or profound to be sure but the most influential because of his astonishing breadth energy productivity and pedagogical skills in explaining liberal orthodoxy to an

The great bulk of Thomas Keneally rsquo s 30-some books have been fiction but he rsquo s at his best when dealing with facts as in his splendid novelized biography Schindler rsquo s List 1993 his family-clan-nation epic The Great Shame and the Triumph of the Irish in the English-Speaking Worl

During a recent appearance on Bill Moyers rsquo s PBS news program ldquo Now rdquo 4 04 Susan Sontag ruefully noted the timeliness of her new book about pictures of the victims of violence in general and of war in particular It had she admitted ldquo an obscenely topical character rdquo

In Stanzas From the Grande Chartreuse 1855 Matthew Arnold famously agonized over being caught between two conflicting worlds a beloved but dead faith and whatever unknown but no doubt chilling forces that would replace it Compared with the complex predicaments facing Yezad Chenoy and other ch

American Catholics old enough to remember Bishop Fulton J Sheen and his famous chalk talks on televisionsermonettes punctuated by occasional salvos against Communism psychoanalysis and birth controlwill be stunned by how much more worldly engaging and hip apologetics can be in the hands of a maes

Back in the 1960 rsquo s some angry radicals liked to call their country Amerika the k vaguely hinting that the land of the free and the home of the brave was in fact a cruel and alien place with a whiff or two of Nazism Really angry radicals sometimes spelled it AmeriKKKa Curiously enough En

Right beneath the title the jacket of The Whore rsquo s Child displays a bare black cross and we soon discover why The subject of the title story is of all things an aging nun whose beloved absent father turns out to have been her hated mother rsquo s pimp What the embittered Sister Veroniqu

Well he was also a late Victorian born in 1872 He did his most celebrated writing and drawing in the reign of George V and he survived George VI dying in 1956 But as Hall convincingly claims For Max the past remained present From the day he left the London scene in 1910 he was for nearly