It could be said that the pun is mightier than the sword. If this is true, then wordplay may be as important as swordplay in the never ending wars between the dark powers of the underworld and the light of Christ. So this essay on the brilliantly annoying style of G. K. … Read more
Losing Mum and Pup: A Memoir Christopher Buckley, Twelve, 272 pages, $24.99 And Noah, a farmer, planted a vineyard. He drank of the wine and became drunk and was uncovered in his tent. And Ham, the father of Cannan, saw his father uncovered and he denounced him to his two brothers outside. And Shen and … Read more
Flannery: A Life of Flannery O’Connor Brad Gooch; Little, Brown & Company; 464 pages; $30 Perhaps the most fascinating thing about Flannery O’Connor is that she is fascinating at all. Compared to other 20th-century literary figures, she lived a dull life. She never lost her mind. She didn’t sleep around. She didn’t have a drinking … Read more
White Guard Mikhail Bulgakov, Yale University Press, 310 pages, $18 “Great was the year and terrible the Year of Our Lord 1918, the second since the Revolution had begun.” So opens White Guard, the new and utterly admirable translation of Mikhail Bulgakov’s first novel, written some 83 years ago when the author was just 22. … Read more
Last month, I was celebrating the Naxos American Classics release of Vittorio Giannini’s Piano Concerto and his Symphony No. 4. When I pleaded that Naxos consider recording the other six symphonies, I had forgotten that Naxos has already released Giannini’s Symphony No. 3 (1958), so it has only five to go. The Third Symphony is … Read more
Most Americans are familiar with the young Abraham Lincoln. Stories abound of his truth telling, rail splitting, candlelight reading, soil tilling, store keeping, and flatboat driving. Amazingly enough, James M. McPherson has managed to touch on all of them — and a few more besides — in this brief biographical essay written to coincide with … Read more
In his powerful novel Serena, Ron Rash offers a haunting depiction of greed, inhumanity, and single-minded ambition. Put in more stark terms, he writes about the force of evil. Set in the Appalachians of Western North Carolina during the Great Depression, the book tells the story of a logging company owner named Pemberton and … Read more
He gets it. Stephen Catanzarite has written arguably the most important book about rock music of the young 21st century. U2’s Achtung Baby: Meditations on Love in the Shadow of the Fall is a small volume — more like a thick pamphlet than a book — but each line is a mini-dissertation on the … Read more
During the post-Vatican II push for more “relevant” religion classes, students in my high school “Theology of the Film” course trooped off to see Dirty Harry — the 1971 drama starring Clint Eastwood as the police lieutenant who violates the law, including the torture of suspects, to protect San Franciscans from a wily serial killer. … Read more
The other night, along with many other Americans, I watched the Frank Capra classic It’s a Wonderful Life. Starring Jimmy Stewart and Donna Reed, the movie has become a Christmas staple — but it was not always that way, and how it attained its holiday status has as much to do with the intricacies of … Read more
Since the death of J. F. Powers in 1999, admiring reviewers (all of his reviewers have been admiring) have mourned not only his death, but the general obscurity of his novels and stories. Although his first novel, Morte D’Urban, won the 1963 National Book Award — over the more familiar names of John Updike, Katherine … Read more
A thoughtful exploration of Catholicism and the problem of evil — in a sci-fi flick? Matthew Lickona looks at the unlikely X-Files. There was nothing else playing. Well, almost nothing. We’d seen Dark Knight already — my brother, my father, and I — and the theater in my hometown, where we were gathered, wasn’t carrying … Read more
When Joseph Pearce’s epically titled The Quest for Shakespeare was released from Ignatius Press earlier this year, the Catholic blogosphere erupted with reports that William Shakespeare was finally, 400 years after the fact, proud to be papist. Although early modernists (a.k.a. Renaissance scholars) have been pondering Shakespeare’s possible relationship with the Romish Church for decades … Read more
 Adolf Hitler aspired to be a painter, and he became a tyrant. As a painter he was mediocre, but his understanding of art’s power was second to none. Hitler knew that conquering Europe would require more than war; it would call for a complete domination of the culture, especially its art and architecture.  … Read more
The newest Bond pic borrows too much from that other spy franchise. Â Â When you get older, fellow agent Rene Mathis tells James Bond, “villains and heroes get all mixed up.” Â Indeed, a conspicuous moral ambiguity infects virtually every scene in Quantum of Solace, the long-awaited follow-up to 2006’s franchise “reboot” Casino Royale. … Read more
Redeemed: A Spiritual Misfit Stumbles Toward God, Marginal Sanity, and the Peace that Passes All Understanding Heather King, Viking Adult, 256 pages, $24.95 There have been times, in the course of raising my little brood of Young Catholics, when I have sighed and wondered, “What does religion have to do with my children, with their … Read more
One of the most gripping and spiritually terrifying novels I’ve encountered is Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray. The story is well known from many film versions, none of which does the story justice, since the visual inevitably puts the focus on the horrors of the painting itself. This is really a distraction, because … Read more
Called Out of Darkness: A Spiritual Confession Anne Rice, Knopf, 256 pages, $24 A decade ago, Anne Rice — the best-selling author of gothic tales of nocturnal bloodsuckers — found herself “Christ-haunted.” Statues of the saints, half-ruined Catholic churches, and the crucified Christ reignited the long dormant piety that suffused her New Orleans childhood. Flannery … Read more
“Well, there goes my Catholic hipster cred,” I said to The Wife the morning after seeing Fireproof, the new film from the Christian filmmaking team behind Facing the Giants. “Now I have to go on record saying I didn’t hate a film where accepting Jesus Christ as your personal Lord and Savior plays an integral … Read more
I don’t know if Bill Maher would call himself a comedian these days, but it’s fair to say that his roots are in comedy. Religulous, his new film, features at least a couple clips from his stand-up days, including one from The Tonight Show back in the Carson era. A young Maher is riffing on … Read more