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Flannery O’Connor: Stamped but not Cancelled
On June 5, 2015, the U.S. Postal Service published a commemorative stamp in honor of Flannery O’Connor. O’Connor is an anomalous candidate for such acclaim, since her work stands...
The Last Man and the First Man
Scanning half a dozen major journals for obituaries devoted to the most important mystery writer of our time, P. D. James (1920–2014), I was astonished to find that not...
Art and Soul
A Prayer Journal by flannery o’connor farrar, straus and giroux, 112 pages, $18If we could accurately map heaven,” Flannery O’Connor wrote in her newly published A Prayer Journal, “some...
Orthodoxy at a Hundred
G. K. Chesterton’s most renowned book is a hundred years old. Orthodoxy was first published in London by John Lane Press in 1908, and it has never gone out...
The Catholic Fantastic of Chesterton and Tolkien
It is often assumed that G. K. Chesterton and J. R .R. Tolkien were reactionary, antimodern writers. In a certain sense they were. Tolkien regarded nearly everything worthy of...
Murder in the Vicarage
The Lighthouse by P.D. James Knopf, 352 pages, $25.95. IN HIS CELEBRATED 1948 essay on detective fiction, “The Guilty Vicarage,” W.H. Auden argued that the appeal of crime novels...
Ivan Karamazov’s Mistake
It is has become commonplace to regard Ivan Karamazov’s “Legend of the Grand Inquisitor” as a prescient parable glorifying human freedom and defending it against the kind of totalitarian...
American Evangelical Christianity: An Introduction
American Evangelical Christianity: An Introduction by mark a. noll blackwell, 332 pages, $32.13 With the death of Sydney Ahlstrom and the retirements of Robert Handy and Martin Marty from...
Protestants and Pictures: Religion, Visual Culture, and the Age of American Mass Production
Protestants and Pictures: Religion, Visual Culture, and the Age of American Mass Production by david morgan oxford university press, 432 pages, $87.18 In accord with much of Scripture itself,...
In Defense of Disbelief
A healthy dose of Christian disbelief or “holy skepticism” would serve as a much-needed antidote to the soft-core spirituality that saps much of contemporary Christianity, especially in its evangelical...
