Rather than a triumph, Dionne says "the history of contemporary American conservatism is a story of disappointment and betrayal.” But is his diagnosis correct?
Slots, video poker, and other gambling machines are often described as games, but they're a sinful rejection of the goodness of the world and a failure to rejoice.
Among the merits of Roy Foster’s new book are the ways in which it moves past myths and conventional accounts to bring alive the intellectual ferment of the Rising.
Fleming Rutledge probes “the strange new world of the Bible” to its mysterious and scandalous depth in the crucifixion of God's son, and diagnoses our deepest need.
The stories in Colum McCann's collection each have thirteen sections that build slowly, surely toward denouement. By the end, a shift in perspective has taken place.
Many take Frost’s 'The Road Not Taken' as an American affirmation to choose one's own path. But in David Orr's reading the twenty-line poem is instead about limits.
"War and Peace" is called the greatest novel ever written, but it’s like sticking a “Kick me” sign on the book. Readers can’t help wanting to take issue with it.
Why are there more versions of 'Anna Karenina' (1878) in 2016? According to some translators "the best" will never be available and so translation must continue.
Paul Lisicky's book is a memoir of love and friendship, and how sometimes their boundaries blur. But it's also a book about literary ambition and its discontents.
How to describe the almost-madness of loss? Macdonald uses hawk-taming, Smith "ordinary" poetry about death, and Chapman "Christian love of existence."
Luke Timothy Johnson provides an important alternative to the “theologies of the body” on offer among those thinkers elaborating themes fashioned by John Paul II.
It is the purpose Michael N. McGregor’s biography of Robert Lax to move him out from under the shadow of Merton’s personality and give him his own place in the sun.
Terry Eagleton gives a witty and insightful tour of hope’s complicated linguistic terrain that carefully avoids proposing some once-and-for-all grand Theory of Hope.
Writers engage biblical texts ranging from the Psalms to a single parable.Their essays are wildly heterogeneous in tone and method, kind of like the Bible itself.
Philip Jenkins sets out to demolish a popular theological myth that the second-century apocryphal writings were unknown until recently; he makes a convincing case.
Paul Misner's new book goes beyond social and labor movements in the church to deal with papal and episcopal action vis-à-vis the great powers between 1914 and 1965.
For scholars interested in the history of theology and biblical interpretation, these twelve short essays offer new approaches to Psalms, moral philosophy, and more.
Mathewes-Green, a convert from the Episcopal tradition, focuses on Orthodoxy as a path to God and uses the actions and prayers of the liturgy as a basis for theology
Editors Paul Reitter and Chad Wellmon contend that Nietzsche’s impassioned critique of 19th century education sheds light on the decline of education in the 21st.
Scott Shane's telling of the U.S.-born Muslim preacher-turned-terrorist and his surveillance by the FBI reveals that the calculus for terrorism is political.
In his latest, Thomas Mallon turns real-life figures like Nixon, Reagan, and Nancy Reagan's astrologer into characters as skillfully as he creates fictional ones.
In Ta-Nehisi Coates’s interpretation of race in America, hope doesn't fit into the narrative—something James Baldwin, to whom he's compared, wouldn't leave out.
What fascinates Maraniss about Detroit more than its ruin is how central its story is to the broader course of U.S. history—Motown, the local Mob, the auto industry.
'Go Set Watchman' shows that though Atticus Finch defended a black man in court, he was still a man of his time—on the white citizens council, resisting integration.
John Boyne’s new novel pays attention to the circumstances of priestly life in real-world Catholic Ireland, asking: How does one be a good priest under suspicion?
Anahid Nersessian argues that Romanticism dramatizes the “desirability of constraint.” Her book on how British Romantics imagined "utopia" powerfully does the same.
Historical reminders of how the Mediterranean connects Europe, Asia, and Africa at least as often as it separates the three continents from one another.
Girlhoods, boyhoods, childhoods, "freindships": Youth is the setting (and subject) in works by Jane Austen, J.M. Coetzee, Michael Ondaatje, and Leo Tolstoy.
These books offer two rewards: a lot of fascinating information, and an opportunity to think hard about history and being human. But they prompt some questions too.
The case for "youthful credulity" when reading; Don DeLillo's moral but discomforting vision; a new translation of Julian of Norwich's 'Revelations of Divine Love.'
A biographical novel for Thomas Hardy fans; a theory on how Christianity came to dominate Europe; short poems; and the fascinating (true) tale of a house in Germany.
Donaldson's willingness to admit imperfections in his work and the mistakes he’s made in pursuit of his subjects makes him a winning guide to literary biography.
Mary Ziegler’s account of the “lost” history of Roe may surprise even the closest (and oldest) observers of the battles following the 1973 Supreme Court decision.
James Booth examines Philip Larkin’s life and work. Colm Tóibín writes on Elizabeth Bishop. James Wood looks at religious and secular modes of narration in novels.
John Norris's new biography of Pulitzer prize-winning political journalist (and Commonweal Catholic) Mary McGrory is engaging, carefully researched, and sympathetic.
