The recent toppling of statues regarded as representing white supremacy is a sign that James Joyce’s Ulysses may soon be toppled from its top rank on the lists of great novels. Not only is James Joyce a dead, white, European male, but his work, particularly Ulysses, demands an understanding of Irish politics, Dublin geography, and … Read more
John Senior is known as a cultural warrior for his books on Christian culture and as a pioneering educator for his role in the Integrated Humanities Program at the University of Kansas. As an English professor, his spiritual odyssey took him through the literature of East and West. His doctoral dissertation focused on the role … Read more
James Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist As A Young Man turns 100 this year. Not bad for a book that, like some of the stories in Joyce’s Dubliners (1914) and Ulysses (1922) almost didn’t get published at all. Now that the copyright is up on Joyce’s work, the Joyce estate, which has been protected … Read more
 Last week I made melancholy tribute to the shrinking cadre of men who heed the call to serve Christ’s Church as priests, and tried to think of ways we can offer them human support while they go about God’s business. Whenever I think about the question of calling, I’m reminded of my own brush … Read more
The LA Times’ Jacket Copy blog — tagline “Books, Authors and All Things Bookish” — recently alerted me to one of the most enjoyable “quickie time-waster websites” I’ve found in quite some time: I Write Like. Based on “a Bayesian classifier” — the programming backbone for a number of ordinary, run-of-the-mill spam filters — the website is disarmingly … Read more