Books

Article

My Two Italies

How can a civilization that produced Michelangelo and Fellini also have spawned the Mafia and Mussolini? And how can 'The Godfather' be an expression of ethnicity?
Article

Evolution, Games, and God

Evolution shows that humans aren’t only competitive. We can be cooperative and altruistic too—and we have a theologian and a mathematical biologist here to prove it.
Article

My Struggle

No one predicted that the most striking literary phenomenon of the early twenty-first century would be this six-volume novel by a Norwegian writer, about himself.
Article

Fields of Blood

Karen Armstrong challenges the idea that the relationship between religion and violent conflict is simple and direct.
Article

Icons of Hope

John E. Thiel's theological writing has always combined poise and a sense of urgency, and this intricately argued treatise on eternal life is no exception.
Article

Accepting the Disaster

Almost every poem in Joshua Mehigan's collection contains a striking formal moment, where he uses meter or rhyme or line break to do something surprising.
Article

Strange Glory

A rich and detailed account of Bonhoeffer’s immensely eventful life—the personal, intellectual, and spiritual journey that ended in a Nazi concentration camp.
Article

Abraham Joshua Heschel

Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel was one of the most eloquent religious figures of the twentieth century—a “jeweler of words,” in the estimation of one colleague.
Article

No, Thank Him

At the heart of this fine book is Leithart's treatment of the Christian disruption of settled ideas about gift-giving and gratitude.
Article

'An Anxious Age'

The collapse of establishment Protestantism as the American civil religion, Bottum asserts, has left a deep void that sends ripples of unease through the culture.
Article

Family Values

Fest’s absorbing memoir is an unprecedented attempt to take American audiences deep into Hitler’s Germany from the point of view of Germans who rejected Hitler.
Article

God Bless Americanism

A book on four U.S. clerics who were involved in an early-twentieth-century theological controversy that sent Catholic intellectuals scrambling for cover.
Article

God & the Desert

Why do these ten masterful literary essays from a doubt-seasoned Catholic "risk blasphemy"? "Because they speak of the God of the desert."