First Things RSS Feed - Betty Carter https://www.firstthings.com/author/betty-carter en-us Copyright 2025 First Things. All Rights Reserved. ft@firstthings.com (The Editors) ft@firstthings.com (The Editors) Mon, 20 Jan 2025 16:52:58 -0500 https://d2201k5v4hmrsv.cloudfront.net/img/favicon-196.png First Things RSS Feed Image https://www.firstthings.com/rss/author/betty-carter 60 In Praise of Fruit: A Review of Angel Time by Anne Rice https://www.firstthings.com/web-exclusives/2009/09/in-praise-of-fruit-a-review-of-angel-time-by-anne-rice https://www.firstthings.com/web-exclusives/2009/09/in-praise-of-fruit-a-review-of-angel-time-by-anne-rice Thu, 10 Sep 2009 00:04:00 -0400 Asking Christopher Buckley to review a memoir of a Christ-haunted ex-Catholic who falls back into the arms of the Church is lik e inviting your diabetic friend to a dessert bar. What did you think of the banana pudding? Was it worth the coma? But that’s exactly what the New York Times did last year when they handed him Anne Rice’s spiritual autobiography, Called Out of Darkness . Buckley, famous agnostic son of America’s most famous Catholic intellectual, proclaimed it “the literary equivalent of waterboarding” and wrote that “Confessional (and profess-ional) literature is like faith itself: to believers, the poem of perfect lucidity and logic; to the unconvinced (in whose camp I squat, nervously clutching Christopher Hitchen’s pant leg) it can sound a little, well, fruity.”

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