Henri Nouwen, a Pierrot-like figure with many masks, turned personal vulnerability into spiritual exploration, addressing other people’s pain by sharing his own.
How did a shy young woman from the suburban Midwest turn into someone brave enough to travel by foot from village to village in the midst of a civil war?
When it comes to the world’s most deadly diseases, our profit-based pharmaceutical system is a failure. That's why Rachel Kiddell-Monroe wants fundamental change.
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.
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
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.
The changes of Vatican II and the turmoil of the civil-rights and anti-war movements made for heady days, and Sister Corita Kent’s art further exemplified the times.
Like St. Gregory, Bishop Djomo of the Congo is committed to building unity among his own local people—and he lives in a world lacking effective public services.
John Norris's new biography of Pulitzer prize-winning political journalist (and Commonweal Catholic) Mary McGrory is engaging, carefully researched, and sympathetic.
Spanning almost James Agee's entire lifetime, these letters between author and his priest cover alcohol, God, poetry, childhood, and a “mouthful of sweet potato.”
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?
Chicago, 1932. The night before he would knock Ernie Schaaf unconscious, the second time a fighter would die from one of Max’s blows. We were standing at the bar.
Amusing and engaging, Barney Frank's stories (from sixteen terms in Congress) tell what kinds of “inside politicking” informed the presidencies of LBJ through Obama.
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.
The award-winning author of the story collection 'Night at the Fiestas' talks about her influences, the importance of empathy in fiction, and washing altar cloths.
The pro-British kings archeologist-turned-spy-turned-colonel T.E. Lawrence helped establish in Arabia, Iraq, and Transjordan made "Arab unity" a "madman's notion."
Often the way our society treats "senior citizens" assumes that as bodies age, individuality decreases. But aren't whiskers and white socks a sign of unique wisdom?
Mailer, Trilling, Macdonald, Kazin, Maxwell, Bellow, Auden, O'Hara—men with public moral concerns, who seized power to shape American literature. But who were they?
The Catholic painter Peter Paul Rubens presents a particular challenge to classification—decorative, theatrical, busy, pagan, and only superficially Christian.
What some critics see as Rolheiser’s complacent, uncritical embrace of modern secular society is actually borne of his confidence in God's abiding presence and care.
People care passionately about their places of worship. That puts a liturgical designer like Lawrence Hoy in the line of fire, but that's just where he wants to be.
The poet discusses "accidental theologies," Gerard Manley Hopkins, faith in literature, and what it's like no longer being the editor of Poetry magazine.
