Malachy G. Carroll might have had only one novel in him, and he might have only one novel to his largely unknown name, but it’s a minor classic that every Catholic should read. It's 1952, and John Wayne’s latest film, The Quiet Man, is a huge hit at the box office. It is about a [...]
Allen Guelzo might very well have had the current state of affairs in his country in mind when he set out to offer this rumination on Abraham Lincoln. It would be hard, if not impossible, to imagine otherwise. Our Ancient Faith: Lincoln, Democracy, and the American Experiment, by Allen C. Guelzo (247 pages, Knopf, 2024) [...]
Some people frolic in the European Middle Age, whereas most people hearing that designation think hair loss and weight gain. And that is too bad, because there and then resided Geoffrey Chaucer, the second greatest poet in English. If only the selective reading public knew better, they would be dazzled by his masterwork, The Book [...]
Christopher Owen tells Willmoore Kendall’s story in an interesting way that keeps the reader’s attention while conveying Kendall’s struggles that led to his evolution of thought and conservative philosophy. In our time when populist ideals are on the rise, this book is required reading to understand what it means to be conservative. Heaven Can Indeed [...]
D.G. Hart perceptively notes that Benjamin Franklin was not a Deist, as popular memory claims, but rather a "cultural Protestant." As such, he "applied much of what Protestants taught about work and study in the secular world without accepting all that the churches taught about the world to come." Benjamin Franklin: Cultural Protestant (270 pages, [...]
What will delight lovers of J.R.R. Tolkien most is the portrait of the man that is drawn in the pages of Holly Ordway's biography. In the final chapters, she summarizes his life as the extraordinary fleshed out in ordinary. While Tolkien is completing his magnum opus, he is also maintaining the daily routine of husband, [...]
J.R.R. Tolkien connected me to a world beyond anything I had yet experienced in rather idyllic Kansas. I so desperately wanted to escape into his mountain scene, explore every nook and cranny of that invented world, and meet a God who sang the universe into existence. Though I have read The Hobbit, The Lord of [...]
God is always there, searching us out, and he is always saying, “Where are you?”, not because he does not know where we are, but because we do not know where we are, nor where we are going when sin and shame make us run from the only One who can heal us. Could have [...]
The first Christians practised a way of life they simply called ‘The Way’ in which they received God’s love endlessly poured out by their Risen Lord. They called this the spiritual life because the love of the Risen Lord was none other than the Holy Spirit, the One whose love had bonded the Father to [...]
Whether 1968 really was “the year that broke politics” is, at best, debatable. But it certainly was a year during which past patterns of politics were seriously upended. In other words, the title of Luke A. Nichter's book is more eye-catching than accurate. Nonetheless, there was collusion and chaos aplenty in that fateful year. The [...]
Such are the power and relevance of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's words, that we would be doing ourselves a disservice if we did not engage with his memories in an effort to connect them with our own, transforming them into something new. And, happily, this is what the authors of "Solzhenitsyn and American Culture" do. “Own only [...]
The acceptance of Shakespeare’s Catholic sympathies and sensibilities animates "Shakespeare: The Magician and the Healer," by Annie-Paule de Prinsac, who argues that the Bard disguised himself and his meaning in a mannerist mask, which simultaneously and paradoxically revealed truths indirectly and allegorically which it was illegal for him to reveal candidly. Times have changed and [...]
Christianity is primarily concerned with teaching us how to turn and open ourselves to receive the same Holy Spirit who filled Jesus Christ. The more we are filled with His love, the easier it is to return it in kind, as the divine suffuses and then surcharges human love so that it can reach up [...]
Margaret Ellsberg’s volume contains her own biographical, critical, and indeed spiritual understanding of Gerard Manley Hopkins, a poet whose brilliant lines were not appreciated in his time and whose life included both the glory and agony of the Christ he served. The Gospel in Gerard Manley Hopkins: Selections from His Poems, Letters, Journals, and Spiritual [...]