“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.
Frederica Mathewes-Green on Eastern Orthodoxy; Brian E. Daley and Paul Kolbert on Psalm interpretations, Philip Jenkins on lost gospels; James O’Donnell on pagans
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
Bruce Chatwin casts travel as an act of sacrifice, of “sloughing-off” the world and discovering the self anew. His work contains moments of aching spirituality.
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.
The air raids of May 1941 stand out in the memory because they were so ferocious. The norm—insofar as there was a norm—fell into a more predictable quasi-routine.
Considering how religiously diverse and culturally cosmopolitan its cities were before WWI, few could have foreseen today’s calamity for the Middle Eastern region.
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.
Anahid Nersessian argues that Romanticism dramatizes the “desirability of constraint.” Her book on how British Romantics imagined “utopia” powerfully does the same.
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.
As a result of a recent vogue for feeling culturally embattled, the word “Christian” now is seen less as identifying an ethic, and more as identifying a demographic.
In “Christian Human Rights,” Samuel Moyn concedes that the modern human-rights movement is untethered from its Christian origins. Is this something to worry about?
Stone’s characters were human, and humans screw up; there wasn’t much to do about that except to situate the culprits in clarifying narratives of moral scrutiny.
Peter Mitchell’s take on Charles Curran and the “dissident theologian” strike at Catholic University in 1967 presents a conspiracy so big it’s literally incredible.
The strangeness of Freeman’s title commands attention; Kaplan constructs a microhistory of religious conflict; Lipton presents a learned study; Manseau on diversity.
In this collection of essays, authors draw on “Theology of the Body” to present the Church as a place where women’s leadership can flourish. The results are mixed.
The result of her years-long quest to find fellow victims of smear campaigns, Dreger’s ‘Galileo’s Middle Finger’ reveals a problem larger than political correctness.
Centered around the missing bomber pilot from ‘Life After Life,’ Atkinson’s ‘A God in Ruins’ examines the interplay of real life and the life of the imagination.
In his new book on labor, Thomas Geoghegan—a longtime labor lawyer in Chicago—lays out many of the depressing ways that American workers have been moving backward.
One of Merton’s gifts as a writer was the ability to insinuate himself into the lives of those he’d never met and remain a personal presence decades after his death.
Frank Bruni challenges elitist assumptions about what “counts” as a worthy education, and Fareed Zakaria defends the usefulness and versatility of the liberal arts.
Celan’s work has prompted an often reverential critical response. But his poetry is always difficult and sometimes agonizing; reading it provides no easy pleasures.
Narrated by the nameless victim’s brother, Kamal Daoud’s novel asks: Did Camus intend to use the Algerian murder victim in ‘The Stranger’ as a disposable prop?
Chen Guangcheng’s condemnation of the Chinese state is told through his story of legal activism, resulting torture, trial, house arrest, and an escape to the U.S.
Biographer Randy Boyagoda paints Richard John Neuhaus as an unusually ambitious and politically engaged priest as public intellectual—but is his narrative too tidy?
Claudia Rankine’s ‘Citizen’ and Jeffery Renard Allen’s ‘Song of the Shank’ both take up the issue of race in America in jagged and beautiful poetry and prose.
Laura Swan does a good job of explaining both the beguines’ spiritual practices in the context of their own times and how their continuing legacy affects us today.
Even if her new novel gives us pleasure, shouldn’t we be able to remember Harper Lee as a member of one of the most unusual groupings in literary history?
Anne Enright’s new novel suggests something simple—family, for good or ill, keeps forming us even when we try to escape it—but her prose constantly surprises.
Paul Moses’s history of Irish-Italian relations in 19th century New York delves into the causes for “race war” between the immigrant groups and how they overcame it.
Langdon Hammer’s biography of poet and writer James Merrill is “wholly definitive” in scope, and threaded throughout with Merrill’s brilliant, always enlivening wit.
If you ask me, being a writer is a little like falling in love. No matter how uncomplicated it seems at the start, it is always complicated. The trick is to persist.
Ireland’s fiction laureate talks about sex and death in Ireland; Pope John Paul II’s 1979 visit to the country; Kafka and kids; and her new novel, ‘The Green Road.’
The pattern of income inequality is more than a social problem, Robert Putnam says; it’s a social tragedy, most devastating in the lives of poor American children.
Many modern American thinkers have asked, often and with anxiety, “What is man?” In his latest book, Mark Greif thinks we’ve outgrown this—and it’s a good thing.
In his final book, the late Peter Gay expands familiar notion of the Romantic rebellion against Enlightenment rationality, to the focus on artistic self-expression.
Readers “angered at the tortured logic of the editors” respond to the removal of Bishop Finn, Francis’s failures, the value of “big history,” and how to know Jesus.
