The New Republic posted a little forum yesterday under the title “Do Humans Still Need to Study the Humanities?” The editors asked four former presidents of major institutions to answer the question. All of them state their commitment to humanities instruction and their regret that the fields have become marginal in recent years. Continue Reading »
Aquinas at Prayer: The Bible, Mysticism and Poetry? by paul murray, o.p. ?bloomsbury, 288 pages, $27.95 How did Thomas Aquinas pray? In Aquinas at Prayer, Paul Murray, O.P., sheds light on Thomas’s more mystical side by commenting on the prayers and liturgical poetry that he wrote as well as . . . . Continue Reading »
The books of 2014, like the books of any year, utterly exceed our grasp. In one aspect, they suggest (they mimic, we could say) the divinely gratuitous excess of Creation; seen from another angle, their multiplicity reflects our fallenness, our propensity to error, our confusion. We need to hold . . . . Continue Reading »
A Change of Heart: A Personal and Theological Memoir by thomas c. odenintervarsity, 384 pages, $40 Autobiographies are typically opportunities for the display of ego and the rationalizing of error. They have been so at least since Julius Caesar’s military memoirs. In our day, it is not just . . . . Continue Reading »
The Father’s Will: Christ’s Crucifixion and the Goodness of God ?by nicholas e. lombardo, o.p. ?oxford, 288 pages, $99 Sound Christian theology,” writes Nicholas Lombardo, “must keep a clear distance between God’s will and the moral evil of Christ’s crucifixion.” This is easier said . . . . Continue Reading »
Two weeks ago, I reported on a poll by Scholastic demonstrating the importance of parents reading aloud to their children well past the age that children can read on their own. There is another aspect to the poll worth mentioning, and it’s backed up by what adolescents say about reading. Continue Reading »
Everybody knows how important it is to read to toddlers. Apart from the emotional element, reading out loud every day during the pre-K years sends a child to kindergarten with a significantly larger vocabulary than a child without that experience possesses. And what happens in kindergarten and after is that the gap grows (because of what is called the “Matthew Effect”). Continue Reading »
In Christopher Beha’s excellent debut novel, What Happened to Sophie Wilder?, writer Charlie Blakeman nearly laughs when Sophie, his ex-girlfriend and a Catholic convert, says she plans to save the soul of her dying father-in-law, an atheist: “I don’t think I knew a single person who would have spoken in that way about saving someone’s soul,” Charlie observes. “The religious people I knew talked about their faith apologetically. It was an embarrassment to their own reason and intelligence, but somehow a necessary one.” Continue Reading »
When I was a child,” Marilynne Robinson began an early essay, “I read books.” Lila Ames, the eponymous protagonist of Robinson’s most recent novel, did not. If not for a single year of schooling, she might have never learned to read at all. When she wanders, at age thirty, into Gilead, she is ashamed of the clumsy childishness of her own penmanship. Continue Reading »
Many excellent books were published in 2014, but I did not read any of them. Here are the three best books I did read this year, each of which speaks to our current moment despite being technically well out of date. Continue Reading »