November 2013

Philosophical flights, lyrical poetry, and a graphic memoir of bipolar disorder are some of the reads topping my list.

Year in and year out, there are nonfiction books set in the present in which the central questions of Christian belief are taken up dramatically.

Looking westward through the porch screen, / White light from the full moon shivers / On snow crust, on glaze over fields.

The Hildesheim Cathedral in Germany is undergoing major renovation and has sent some of its most beautiful medieval objects to New York.

Spoofs, the importance of context, and "wild things."

In his Fordham lecture Bernardin mentions abortion ten times. The word “fetus” appears twice, but the words “woman” and “women” do not appear at all.

Thirty years later one wonders how many recall the debates the lecture engendered. It bears re-reading; the challenges it poses may be even more pressing now.

Bernardin grasped the idea that the Church’s most important contribution to public life is in shaping a cultural consensus on attitude.

To say that Bernardin's consistent ethic of life did not catch on with the American hierarchy would be an understatement.