On Being a Lapsed Catholic

In 1967, Anthony Burgess, author of “A Clockwork Orange,” described the pain of being an apostate: “It is with no indifferent eye that I view the flood of worshippers pouring into the Catholic church...I want to be one of them, but wanting is not enough.” Continue Reading »

Tate Unmodern

Allen Tate: The Modern Mind and the Discovery of Enduring Loveby john v. glass iiithe catholic university of america, 376 pages, $59.95 I well remember sitting up half the night annotating Allen Tate’s “Ode to the Confederate Dead” in my Norton anthology. As do I remember reading for the first . . . . Continue Reading »

Briefly Noted

On the Road to Vatican II: German Catholic Enlightenment and Reform of the Churchby ulrich l. lehnerfortress, 414 pages, $49 On the Road to Vatican II focuses on German and ­Austrian theological debates in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries as examples of the Catholic Enlightenment. Historians . . . . Continue Reading »