Book Reviews

Review of Natalie Carnes’s Motherhood: A Confession, Christianity Today (May 2020) An excerpt: Mothers today face an onslaught of mixed messages about how best to parent in the 21st century. Podcasts, blogs, and books on mommy-ing abound, but many of them indulge regularly in shallow…

Titled "Reading Dante with a Bang" An excerpt: "It seems that anyone who translates The Divine Comedy must be a presumptuous ass of one kind or another. Yet, Sayers herself translated the fourteenth-century Italian poem because “all great works should be retranslated from time to time, lest…

Titled "A Masterpiece Novel That Should Be an Instant Classic" An excerpt: "Not knowing much about Manzoni, I was delighted to hear of his powerful conversion story in the introduction. Moore explains how this writer, having absorbed the philosophy and art of Romanticism, then turned…

Esau McCaulley’s book reclaims what the Black church has always known. What does it mean to exercise hope while reading the Bible? Esau McCaulley approaches this question through the perspectives and questions Black readers bring to the interpretation of scripture. Reading While Black is a much-needed addition…

Perhaps a hundred years ago feels too distant to be relevant. How much more disconnected does seven hundred years ago feel? Yet, when reporters asked Sigrid Undset why she wrote medieval sagas, the Nobel Prize winning novelist answered, “You can only write novels of your…

We’ve become accustomed to the “battle” language with regards to the liberal arts and the humanities in higher education. What if we pause for a moment to consider who is fighting whom and who are the casualties of this war? When we draw out the…

This is a story that begins with the end of the world. As a young man named Sam Waxworth arrives from “the provinces” to start his new up-and-coming job in New York City, he watches a long-bearded, seemingly fanatical Herman Nash proclaim that the world…

If you ever wonder what you would’ve done had you seen Hitler rise to power, or African American children barred from white schools, Laura Fabrycky reminds us that we’re currently acting in the exact same way we would’ve then. For our time is no less…

In September 2019 Loyola University in Chicago hosted the third biennial Catholic Imagination Conference, attended by hundreds of writers, readers, teachers, publishers, and aficionados of Catholic literature. Headliners include National Book Award winners, bestselling memoirists, award-winning playwrights and filmmakers, and beloved poets: Alice McDermott, Tobias Wolff,…

Parenting children requires a rich understanding of God’s nature. Mothers today face an onslaught of mixed messages about how best to parent in the 21st century. Podcasts, blogs, and books on mommy-ing abound, but many of them indulge regularly in shallow parenting advice and fallacies…