This is the first time since 2001 that 9/11 has snuck up on me unannounced. For the past five years, the anniversary has been preceded by a sinking feeling in my stomach that wouldn’t leave until 9/12. And then, of course, there is the usual media rush to wring every last ounce of pathos from … Read more
It has been said that while writing the Summa, Saint Thomas Aquinas was, among other things, engaging in a dialogue with Saint Augustine across the cenÂturies. In his extraordinary Jesus of Nazareth, Pope Benedict XVI also seems to regard, in his mind’s eye, a number of interlocutors, living and dead.    It has … Read more
We all awakened this morning to the news that the greatest voice of our generation, Luciano Pavarotti, had died. The sound of his voice is something that I have carried inside my head since my early 20s, when I first heard him sing La Boheme at the Metropolitan Opera. I heard him sing … Read more
Trinket shops at roadside tourist spots used to sell items like shellacked coasters cut from cross sections of white pine or birch logs, or faux-bark mottoes inscribed with uplifting sentiments, or bawdy farmyard postcards. That sort of thing. Perhaps they still do. Among the trinkets, one could always find the three monkeys telling … Read more
I do not own a computer printer. My computer is itself a small laptop, which would be too easily dwarfed by such a thing. Worse, if I did have a printer, I would be tempted to use it, and I would soon find that I needed an extra filing cabinet, then a bank of cabinets, … Read more
I recently saw the movie Copying Beethoven. There are very few good films about composers. This is not one of them, although it has the compensation of its "electrifying music," as advertised by the quote from the Seattle Times review on the DVD jacket cover, as if the music had been written for the … Read more
To be perfectly frank, Victor J. Stenger is not on the first string of the atheist team. His writing is lackluster, his reasoning is often quite shallow, and he regularly dismisses the most complex points with a self-congratulatory wave. He knows a lot about science (and well he should, since he is emeritus professor of … Read more
In The Stripping of the Altars—the single most important book in English Reformation studies in the past 50 years—Eamon Duffy demonstrates the vitality of popular religion in England in the years leading up the Reformation. Duffy’s thesis, comprehensively researched and cogently argued, turned inside-out—or, more precisely, upside-down—the received opinion concerning the Reformation in England, namely, … Read more
Does God answer prayers, or do we—by ardently pursuing our heart’s desires—answer our own prayers, gift and bless ourselves? That is a question anyone reading Anthony DeStefano’s slim volume Ten Prayers God Always Says Yes To might instinctively pose, and with some justification. The question could be called a subtext to the book’s … Read more
Alexis de Tocqueville was born—and died—a Catholic. He lost his faith as an adolescent, but it had already broadened and enlightened him (indeed, his childhood tutor was a beloved priest) and made him the brilliant political observer he would become. Tocqueville was an aristocrat from a family that had stood by the Bourbons and … Read more
There’s a problem at the moment in Britain with our sense of national identity. The problem is a compound of many things, of course: an all-pervasive culture of pop music and TV soaps, muddle about the way history is (or isn’t) taught in schools, a substantial and growing Islamic presence, confusion about our role … Read more
If you read reviews no further than the first paragraph, you need read only this: Buy this book, read it, keep it, set it as required reading for your children. Andrew Roberts has penned a splendid, episodic account of the triumph of the English-speaking peoples in the 20th century, charting not only their political and … Read more
Joseph Pearce’s Small Is Still Beautiful is one part commentary on and one part updated application of E. F. Schumacher’s famous Small Is Beautiful. The constant reference to a book that many consider a minor classic is both a strength and a weakness of Pearce’s own book. Imitating Schumacher, Pearce wants to return us to … Read more
As associate dean at a state law school, I receive promotional materials from numerous other law schools. Usually they go straight into the trash can, but I was on my way to the airport for a long flight, and the cover of the spring/summer 2006 issue of BC Law Magazine, published by Jesuit-affiliated Boston College, … Read more
It was a scene that could have come straight from the pages of the New Testament—and one almost unimaginable in today’s caste-ridden India. Around long tables under a large marquee in Hyderabad sat hundreds of people cross-legged on the floor. Clustered in groups of five or six, they ate curry and rice from a shared … Read more
First, I want the reader’s sympathy. Before I wrote this column, I ploughed through the jargon-ridden and statistics-laden pages of a recent study on “Trends and Determinants of Fertility Rates in OECD Countries: The Role of Public Policy.” Once upon a time I read such things with something strangely approaching pleasure. Now they make my … Read more
“We are facing a generation of young singers who are much more diminutive in their approach to singing.” There was nothing diminutive about the man who said that. Jerome Hines (1921–2003) stood six-feet-six-inches tall, and on stage at La Scala in 1968 as Handel’s Hercules, the hero seemed an eponym for himself. His pinnacle was … Read more
The better title for Richard Dawkins’s The God Delusion (or at least the more accurate one, given the self-stated goals of his new book) would be Why There Almost Certainly Is No God. Paring back all the typical Dawkinsian rhetoric, that is all he really attempts to prove. The God Delusion Richard Dawkins, Houghton Mifflin, … Read more
In the past six months, Hollywood has released two major pictures that have each dealt with one of America’s two most famous unsolved criminal mysteries, both of which took place in California. Last year’s The Black Dahlia, directed by Brian De Palma, covered the gruesome and much-publicized murder of aspiring actress Elizabeth Short, whose naked … Read more
Preparing for my priestly ordination, Bishop Austin Vaughan (1927–2000) conferred the ministries of lector and acolyte with such unassuming dispatch that one forgot the man was possibly the smartest bishop in the nation. Nothing seemed quite to fit him; he appeared not so much to be dressed as to be in the process of dressing, … Read more