Books

Subsidy or Subsidiarity

by Gerald J. Russello

Individualism and community are the opposite halves of the American character. For every myth of the self-made man, there is the image of the closely knit New England small town. For every lone cowboy on the frontier, there are the…

The End of the Affair

by William Fahey

It is officially over. I should admit that publicly, shameful and embarrassing though it may be. It pains me to think back over these years. When I first met her I cannot exactly recall (I had heard her name before…

Books for Christmas

by George Weigel

If memory serves, this past year saw electronic books top printed books in the sales figures at Amazon.com. Be that as it may, books—real books—still make wonderful Christmas gifts. Here are some recently published (and read) titles I can recommend…

The Bliss of Solitude

by Charlotte Hays

A Pelican in the Wilderness: Hermits, Solitaries, and Recluses, Isabel Colegate, Counterpoint Press, 320 pages, $25 When the English novelist Isabel Colegate, author of the acclaimed The Shooting Party, discovered an abandoned hermit’s cell in her garden, she restored…

What’s So Great About Catholicism?

by H. W. Crocker III

With its divine foundation, sanction, and mission, nothing could be more glorious than the Catholic Church. But, of course, many people — even many baptized Catholics — don’t see it that way. Yet when the sins of men — secular…

Is Multiculturalism Evil?

by Robert Spencer

Who is the Tolstoy of the Zulus? The Proust of the Papuans? I’d be glad to read him. – Saul Bellow. In asking about the Papuan Proust, novelist Saul Bellow summed up the core problem with the twin idols…

The Witness of Whittaker Chambers

by John C. Chalberg

Whittaker Chambers: A Biography, Sam Tanenhaus, Modern Library, 1998, 638 pages, $20 It was early December 1948, and Congressman Richard Nixon was in the midst of the first of his “six crises.” For the moment this particular crisis was…

A Portrait of Dietrich Von Hildebrand

The name Dietrich von Hildebrand is not, perhaps, as well known as it should be among intelligent and literate Catholics — or, for that matter, among Christians of any ilk. He is a man whom Pius XII referred to as…

Redeeming the Dreary

by Michael Kirk

One of the fundamental characteristics of modernism, that cultural shift in the way we see the world, ourselves and our condition, was the celebration of the ordinary – ordinary life, ordinary work, ordinary people and the ordinary things they do….

On this Crock

by Russell Shaw

Papal Sin: Structures of Deceit, by Garry Wills, (2000) Doubleday, 328 pages, $25 When Pope John Paul II summoned Catholics to a “purification of memory” by facing up to faults, he spoke of a process that should engage us…

Exploring the Supernatural

by Thaddeus J. Kozinski

Things in Heaven and Earth: Exploring the Supernatural, Harold Fickett, ed., Paraclete, 1998, 230 pages, $14. We are now living through a third Great Awakening. It is, of course, a far cry from anything Jonathan Edwards could have imagined….

The Atheist Book by “God”

by L. Brent Bozell III

Those prestigious publishers at Simon and Schuster selected All Saints Day to unleash the book world’s latest attempt at mocking Christianity. It’s called The Last Testament, by God. The author is David Javerbaum, a top writer for 11 years for…

Crisis Magazine Summer Reading List 2011

by Crisis Magazine

With summer fully, oppressively upon us, it’s time once again for the Crisis Magazine Summer Reading List. We’ve asked writers, staff, and friends to share with us some books they’ve recently enjoyed and what they recommend to while away a…

The Home Lives of the Founding Fathers

by Martin Morse Wooster

All of the Founding Fathers were married, and most of them had children. What do the stories of the wives and families of George Washington, Benjamin Franklin, John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, Alexander Hamilton, and James Madison tell us about the…

A sneak peek at Pope Benedict’s new book

by Margaret Cabaniss

Pope Benedict’s second book on Jesus of Nazareth — Holy Week: From the Entrance into Jerusalem to the Resurrection — is set to be released next week, but readers can get a sneak peek at a few sections now. Amy…

Dead Language: A Roger Knight Mystery

by Ralph McInerny

An hour after arrival in Minneapolis Philip Knight called on his client, but the man who answered the door was clearly a policeman. “Is Genevieve Magee at home?” “Who are you?” Though he was on a step below the man,…

On the Reading of Books

by Rev. James V. Schall, S.J.

On Thursday, May 1, 1783, with “the young Mr. (Edmund) Burke” present, Samuel Johnson remarked: “It is strange that there should be so little reading in the world and so much writing. People in general do not willingly read if…

The Longest Night

by Margaret Cabaniss

Tony Judt writes in the latest New York Review of Books about his struggles with Lou Gehrig’s disease, the motor neuron disorder that results in the eventual loss of voluntary muscle movement. At this stage, Judt is effectively a paraplegic,…

Mary as Global Icon

by Gerald J. Russello

The historian Christopher Dawson acknowledged in a 1951 essay the difficulty in explaining the Christian view of history. For Christians, God’s actual involvement in historical time through a particular Person and place is a theological principle around which secular history…

The Voice of Twentieth-Century Catholicism

by Christopher Scalia

Since the death of J. F. Powers in 1999, admiring reviewers (all of his reviewers have been admiring) have mourned not only his death, but the general obscurity of his novels and stories. Although his first novel, Morte D’Urban, won…

The Facts of Life

Catholic parents, let me take this moment to commend you. When it comes to education in . . . well, you know, the — ahem — facts of life, you have bravely stood up for parental rights. You have said:…

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