Culture

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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."
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Poem | Funeral Food

all afternoon friends knocking softly / on the front door of our Ash Alley row home / saying to our mother how sorry / they were about her loss...
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Writing a Life

How should a fair-minded biographer deal with a literary subject’s “sensational underside,” and when does that endeavor turn into "pathography"?
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Deluge & Delusion

Darren Aronofsky, a master of misery, is very much in his element in 'Noah' as he envisions the sinful self-destruction of nearly the whole damned human race.
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Goodbye to All That

By 1982, although nominally still a Democrat, Michael Novak had become an enthusiast for Reaganomics and for every Republican administration to follow.
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Out of One, Many?

The Protestant Establishment once dominated American politics and intellectual life. Then, in the course of a decade or two, its authority collapsed.
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Unwarranted Certainty

An increasing number of cosmologists now believe in the existence of a multiverse. It’s a thrilling prospect; but does a multiverse really exist?
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The Shape of Evil

With her ambitious second novel, Paula Huston jumps into the territory where politics and religion meet, and she's equipped with a wide-angle lens.
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Treacle

The evangelistic fervor of its producers is evident throughout 'Son of God,' but so is bombastic filmmaking lacking in any nuance or freshness of approach.
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Cold Case

With ample suspense and atmosphere, 'Fargo' will appeal to crime-caper addicts and anyone who wants more of the movie’s ready-for-ice-fishing-you-betcha vibe.
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Who Decides?

Yuval Levin reconstructs the conflict over Edmund Burke’s angry 'Reflections on the Revolution in France' and Thomas Paine’s incandescent reply, 'The Rights of Man.'
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Absurd Reality

Imre Kertész is a concentration-camp survivor who keeps a distance from the slogans that remind us “never again.” His novels and short stories spell out these views.
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Poem | Adorations

A noisy scene: / Angel trio in the heavens / warbling and strumming, / two magi volubly disputing, / Joseph itching to join in ...
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The Master

Philip Seymour Hoffman had the greatest range of any character actor of his generation, and his filmography is stupendous in both its length and its variety.
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Born-Again Fiction

Kate Atkinson folds coincidence and a kind of Borges-like fantasy into the framework of a classic English country-house novel.
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Faith-Based Persecution

Though the number of Christians killed and persecuted every year is contested, Shortt clears away misconceptions that other religions are the source of the problem.
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Bottled-Up Yearning

'The Invisible Woman' has tact but lacks Dickensian bustle and comedy; 'Gloria' depicts a woman whose way of surviving is to live on the fly.
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Roth at Rest

Pierpont presents a picture of Philip Roth’s works that contains necessary qualifications: there is no dutiful approval of every word the master has written.