Robin Darling Young

The author of The Violent Bear It Away was a violent woman. Sitting quietly in front of a typewriter in faraway Milledgeville, Georgia, supplied with the eyesight of a bird of prey, Flannery O’Connor used her best instruments, insight and poetic expression, to force her characters right up to . . . . Continue Reading »

Few observers would contest that the exegesis of the Bible has now fully entered a postcritical moment. The rules of the venerable historical-critical method no longer reign supreme, even in the academy. Readers lay and scholarly recognize that the text of the Scriptures is polyvalent and . . . . Continue Reading »

Same-Sex Unions in Premodern Europe By John Boswell Villard Books. 412 pp. $25 Ancient in origin, same-sex unions blessed in the Church occur quietly to this day. So says John Boswell, Professor of Medieval History at Yale University and the author of this new and lavishly publicized book. It may . . . . Continue Reading »

The Land Called Holy: Palestine in Christian History and Thought by Robert L. Wilken Yale University Press, 448 pages, $35 Twice in the history of the region have Christians controlled Palestine: first during the height of the Christian Roman imperium, from the early fourth through the early . . . . Continue Reading »

Inventing the Middle Ages: The Lives, Works, and Ideas of the Great Medievalists of the Twentieth Century by Norman F. Cantor William Morrow, 477 pages, $28 When we read every day of the affairs of some medieval institution”the papacy, the British Parliament, the rabbinate, or the Deir . . . . Continue Reading »

The Oxford Illustrated History of Christianity edited by John McManners Oxford University Press, 724 pages, $45 This is a handsome book, and a weighty one, too, at over seven hundred glossy pages. But was it necessary? Should the general reader trouble himself to know the history of the church? The . . . . Continue Reading »