Dorothy Day is well-known for her ‘paradoxical’ nature, which resists political characterization. A new biography also contextualizes her life, filling in the gaps.
Many of us are familiar with the absurdity-unto-death that is working remotely. Forget the zoom-and-gloom: put down your devices and pick up these new books.
George Orwell was an ornery person, irritable and impatient, and he took an unholy pleasure in upbraiding his left-wing brethren. What would he say to the left now?
David Bentley Hart’s book makes the case for universal salvation, arguing that a belief in eternal damnation is morally repugnant and theologically insupportable.
Set in a miserable dystopia, Houellebecq’s latest novel is both thought-provoking and wearying, fronted by a hypercynical yet dangerously nostalgic narrator.
A new book on Francis by noted papal biographer Austen Ivereigh promised to be more critical. And yet in important ways, it again lets Francis off the hook.
The short poems of Samuel Menashe are unique: self-contained epigrams, charms, wishes, prayers, descriptive one-shots, shapely units of quotable wisdom.
Constitutional issues—like guns or speech—are often seen as coming from opposite points of the ideological spectrum. But they may be more similar than we think.
What can boxing teach us about the good life? Gordon Marino riffs on Sartre, Kierkegaard, and Camus, finding that in order to save our lives, we must risk loving.
Refugees and migrants encounter homesickness as they struggle to establish identities in unfamiliar, often unwelcoming territory. Three books show how they do it.
Fiction is hard. Nonfiction is hard for different reasons: the need to ensure accuracy, the risk of angering your subjects. These books succeed brilliantly.
Every crusade was both more and less than a religious war. No one had a monopoly on brutality, and economic motivations mattered as much as religious ones.
As anyone who uses Facebook knows, we too quickly explain, meaning explain away, the world and each other. It’s not so simple; three books help complicate things.
Heaney’s legacy and his continued popularity as a lyric poet rest on the twelve volumes from which this selection is chosen. What makes his work so alluring?
In recent decades, the institutions created to prevent corrupt dealings have themselves become complicit. Whistleblowers need protection, now more than ever.
The latest novel from Hungarian writer László Krasznahorkai shows his melancholic passion for sin and the apocalypse, and his compassion for the world as it is.
Fr. Luigi Giussani’s experience as a student and teacher made him especially attuned to the rhetorical challenge of helping young people mature in faith and reason.
Colombian novelist Gabriel García Márquez wanted to be known more for his journalistic prose than his novels. A new collection reveals the flaws of that desire.
