In ‘Success and Luck,’ Robert H. Frank explains the human mind is just not designed to think rationally about luck and about how the successful got that way.
In their respective books, Jason Moore and Jedediah Purdy both reckon with ecological disaster under capitalism. But John Ruskin knew something they don’t.
The story of a group of intellectually disabled men contracted for low-wage work in a turkey-processing plant gets the full telling it deserves in Dan Barry’s book.
Lawrence Douglas’s immensely readable book absorbs the reader in the twists and turns of the legal saga of Ivan Demjanjuk, charged with Holocaust crimes.
In his new book ‘Inequality,’ Anthony B. Atkinson argues that we can’t reduce inequality by fiscal policy alone. We must also change how incomes are generated.
The most debilitating conceptual limitation in Whitmarsh’s story is an unawareness of what “theism” is—or, how “classical theism” differs from polytheistic myth.
In Robin Lane Fox’s biography of St. Augustine, Augustine doesn’t convert to Christianity; he converts to whatever you get when you put aside worldly ambition.
Early stories of Jews, Christians, and Muslims; the politics of celibacy and marriage; reflections from Cardinal Kasper; afterlife and wealth in early Christianity.
In his examination of imaginative pictures of the afterlife and the ways in which Christians disposed of their wealth, Brown traces two distinct lines of development
From the Cardinal called a “clever theologian” by Pope Francis, this volume of Walter Kasper’s writings characterize the nature of religious belief in late modernity
Gregg looks at five of the two dozen stories with characters shared by the Jewish Bible, New Testament, and Qur’an, interpreting how they are told in each tradition.
Historian Frank Oakley rejects the idea that that Greece and Rome were secular. He insists that the “seedbed” for individual rights lies in the Latin Middle Ages.
Patrick Jordan brings an ease to his subject that comes from true friendship; he weaves together his living sense of Day’s personality with major themes in her work.
Philip & Carol Zaleski bring to life the Oxford literary club who smoked, drank, argued and midwifed books that became classics of fantasy, apologetics, and poetry.
Lincoln is a riddle because we are a riddle to ourselves. We are his heirs, for good and for ill. We cannot escape his legacy, and we don’t know what to make of it.
When Pope Francis issued a formal “bull” instituting the current Year of Mercy, he included in its appendix a lengthy informal interview with an Italian journalist.
Award-winning novelist C. E. Morgan talks about “moral beauty,” evil and empathy, and how landscape informs her work, including her latest, “The Sport of Kings.”
Robert J. Shiller and George A. Akerlof examine influences on the marketplace beyond supply and demand, and wonder: Why didn’t economists see the 2008 crash coming?
Gary Gutting’s new essay collection covers a wide swath of topics, including God, free will, art, education, consciousness, happiness, and the limits of science.
Like Twain’s mother, scrawling her thoughts on little scraps of paper, Scott Simon distilled his long hours in the ICU into clipped reflections, rich with meaning.
Matthew Desmond’s book, through data he compiled on evictions across the U.S., explains the grubby mechanics of exploitation at the bottom end of the housing market.
Marsden’s “biography of a book” traces the development of ‘Mere Christianity’ from a series of BBC radio talks into a religious “antidote for the attention to self.”
A full-length biography was on the minds of neither the author nor the subject met. But Roberts asked Chittister about her personal life. They began at the beginning
In two new books, Hazareesingh and Bell incorporate American views into the 20th century struggles between republicans and Catholics in France over “basic freedoms”
Sarah Bakewell’s latest work subjects (mostly French) existentialist philosophers to scrutiny both as thinkers and as human beings marked by their moment in history.
Beverly Cleary captures a child’s perspective in a way that is totally convincing and never condescending, and feels authentic even several decades on.
Simon Leys’s Catholic sensibility is never insistent, and never descends into preachiness. As he said of Confucius, sometimes it can be better to stay silent.
