A year ago, Pope Francis published his apostolic exhortation on marriage and families, Joy of Love (Amoris laetitia), which, at about 60,000 words, is believed to be the longest papal [...]
In a diary he’s been keeping, a 40-year-old husband and father of three writes about winning $10,000 with a lottery ticket, and, since he expects these jottings to be read [...]
Much of the first half of Willa Cather’s novel Lucy Gayheart is set in the first few months of 1902 in downtown Chicago. Written in 1935, the book is an [...]
Willa Cather was a writer of frontier novels in which Nature — the landscape, the weather, the seasons — is a major character, frequently set in contrast with the big [...]
In the menagerie of literature, fantasy is a curious animal. By its nature, fantasy is supposed to bend reality — but not too much. Fantasy only works if its tethered [...]
As Biff notes at the beginning of Christopher Moore’s comic 2002 novel Lamb: The Gospel According to Biff, Christ’s Childhood Pal, his friend’s name was Joshua. Jesus, he explains, is [...]
There are many paragraphs in Barbara Mahany’s Slowing Time: Seeing the Sacred Outside Your Kitchen Door, that could be scanned as poetry, such as this one: Blessed be the golden [...]
In the past couple weeks, I’ve posted reviews of six books about people living in poverty, published between 1890 and 1986 — nearly a century’s worth. Below are the books [...]
In the late summer of 1985, Jim Gallagher, one of my editors at the Chicago Tribune, came to my desk and told me to put everything on hold. Instead of [...]
There are many ways to approach Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, the majestic, mystical and often maddening book that James Agee and Walker Evans published in 1941. I'm going [...]
