Various

Urban Orders Jane Jacobs was a historian of sorts, demanding that municipal officials not only consider, but celebrate, a community’s unique history in their planning and architectural decisions. When they don’t, as Wilfred McClay notes in his balanced essay on her The Death and Life of . . . . Continue Reading »

• The late Avery Dulles was a great friend of the magazine and of our founder, frequently contributing very significant articles to the magazine. His admirers and readers will be glad to know about The Legacy of Avery Cardinal Dulles, S.J. , recently published by Fordham University Press, and . . . . Continue Reading »

• A few nights ago two of our junior fellows, Matt and Mark, were riding the subway going to visit the third junior fellow, Alex, who lives uptown. As they were heading north on the 1 train, Mark reports, “A middle-aged, normal-looking woman began preaching fire and brimstone in the . . . . Continue Reading »

A Point in Time: The Search for Redemption in this Life and the Next ? by David Horowitz?, Regnery, 126 pages, $24.95 Famous for his conversion from 1960s radicalism to conservatism, David Horowitz’s simple yet startling new book, A Point in Time , is a lyrical and touching meditation on a . . . . Continue Reading »

Purgatorial Conformity Gary Anderson (“Is Purgatory Biblical?” November) gives a capable defense of the doctrine of purgatory based on subtle themes in the Old Testament and the Acts of the Apostles, but he makes no reference to the gospels. A far more explicit biblical case for the . . . . Continue Reading »

Enlightened Monks: The German Benedictines 1740“1803 ?by Ulrich L. Lehner? Oxford 356 pages, $99 As a professor of the religious history of modernity at Marquette University, Ulrich Lehner has focused his recent scholarship on the Catholic responses to the European Enlightenment. In . . . . Continue Reading »

• “You can’t come in without going out, kids. Always go to the funeral.” So Deirdre Sullivan’s father taught her. For her, she said, speaking on NPR, going to funerals was partly a duty and partly a matter of learning to do things for others when doing them wasn’t . . . . Continue Reading »

Tradent and Traitor I am disappointed that my former colleague Leroy Huizenga wrote and that First Things published a review of the updated New International Version (“The Collins Bank Bible,” October) that is biased and (apparently) uninformed about translation. Restriction in my word . . . . Continue Reading »

• The Italian government is trying seven seismologists for manslaughter because they didn’t predict an earthquake in 2009 that killed over 300 people. We think the court should put the tectonic plates on trial too”and if they’re found guilty, put them in chains. • A . . . . Continue Reading »

Julian of Norwich, Theologian by Denys Turner Yale, 262 pages, $40 The fourteenth-century anchorite Julian of Norwich has attracted scholarly interest as one of only a few medieval female authors, while her texts born of sixteen visions from God make her work attractive to those interested in . . . . Continue Reading »