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March 14, 2016
In 1965, James Baldwin and William F. Buckley Jr. participated in a public debate at Cambridge University. Under discussion was the question of whether “the American Dream has been achieved at the expense of the American Negro.” What became clear during the debate is that Baldwin and Buckley largely agreed upon the facts about the status of blacks in America. Both parties agreed that black people had achieved some modest social and material advances since...
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March 14, 2016
Robert Wuthnow, arguably the dean of sociologists of religion, presents in his numerous books a brilliant amalgam of quantitative and qualitative information based on interviews and archival materials. He also has worked with the Gallup Organization and the Pew Foundation and has served on the board of the General Social Survey. He seems dubious about the phrase “American religion”—hence his title suggesting it is something invented—when based only on polling...
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March 14, 2016
This deeply researched and wide-ranging study advances our knowledge of early modern history in diverse and yet complementary ways. On the one hand, Noel Malcolm makes some important contributions with regard to several recent scholarly trends, including studies of borderlands and frontiers between diverse cultures, religions and empires. These encounters typically included both collaboration and confrontation, whether on the individual or collective level,...
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March 7, 2016
This selection of books on the Bible contains one offering for ordinary Catholic laypersons, especially those engaged in various church ministries who wish to begin deepening their knowledge of the Bible: Michael Cameron, Unfolding Sacred Scripture: How Catholics Read the Bible (Chicago: Liturgy Training Publications). Bringing 13 years of experience teaching introductory courses in Bible, he divides his material into two parts: I, “The Catholic...
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February 29, 2016
Network television news programs have brought reports and pictures of news events, mundane and catastrophic, into American homes for little less than three-quarters of a century—not a particularly long time as history goes, but long enough for the medium to have spun a history of its own. It is one that has been told by a number of writers over the years, largely by television insiders—former producers, anchors and reporters—but also by academics. Charles L....
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February 29, 2016
Following the Second Vatican Council, there has been a significant growth in the number of lay and ecclesial Christian movements focusing on the building of community, creating peace, fighting for social justice and offering opportunities for prayer and reflection. Following the canon of social teaching developed since Leo XIII’s groundbreaking Rerum Novarum , these organizations have developed to meet the needs of today’s world with a new emphasis on the...
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February 22, 2016
What is truth? said jesting Pilate, and would not stay for an answer.
–Francis Bacon
In The Age of the Crisis of Man , Mark Greif sets himself the ambitious and “historically indispensable” task, a “philosophical history” focusing on a crisis in determining what is man and what he faces (I use Greif’s “man” for human). “The midcentury generation’s way of addressing the crisis of man...
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February 22, 2016
The Dalai Lama, though a devout Buddhist monk himself, declared recently that religion alone is no longer adequate as a basis for ethics and that the time has come for a new secular way to think about ethics and spirituality.
Stephen Batchelor follows this line of thinking in his new book, After Buddhism . Batchelor identifies himself as a product of a Protestant Christian culture, as well as an atheistic culture. He spent...
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February 22, 2016
Ralph Watkins, a theologian and photographer at Columbia Theological Seminary, noted recently in a conversation on the arts and activism that photographers are both creators and curators, artists who capture what might otherwise be unseen and then design visual experiences intended to move people. Two collections by Jesuit photographers from different eras and contexts reflect Watkins’s wisdom about the social and moral power of the photographer....
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February 15, 2016
This story really begins with Will Eisner, who grew up poor and Jewish in the 1920s and in pre-War, Depression-era Brooklyn. Eisner published what’s generally considered the first graphic novel, A Contract With God , in 1978. He also coined the term “sequential art”—which helps to explain to some of us how comic books became graphic novels. Eisner taught a course on sequential art for years at the School of Visual Arts in New York City. Before that, in 1940,...