Patrick T Reardon | Patrick T Reardon | Writer, Essayist, Poet, Chicago Historian

Book review: “Quebec: Historic Seaport” by Mazo de la Roche

Book ReviewsSeptember 5, 201825Views 0Likes 0Comments

I was flabbergasted by Quebec: Historic Seaport, ostensibly a history of the Canadian city, published in 1944 by novelist Mazo de la Roche. And my flabbergastation only grew greater the more I read the book until it evolved, near the end, into out-and-out disgust. Of course, I knew going into the book that it might be…

Essay: “God is the ocean in which we all swim

National Catholic ReporterSeptember 3, 201818Views 0Likes 0Comments

Patrick T. Reardon 9.4.18

Essay: Pope Francis teaches how to love those we see as sinners

EssaysAugust 27, 201821Views 0Likes 0Comments

The death penalty is wrong in all cases. That’s what Pope Francis proclaimed in early August, and that’s what the Church’s Catechism will be revised to say. It’s an important statement about faith and human rights. And its impact extends beyond those convicted of serious crimes and threatened with execution. The Pope’s order, culminating of an evolution…

Chicago History: Haki Madhubuti, the most influential African-American leader you’ve probably never heard of

Chicago History, Chicago ReaderAugust 26, 201894Views 0Likes 7Comments

This is an expanded version of an article that appeared 8.29.18 in the Chicago Reader. Don L. Lee was ten years old when his mother Maxine took him and his younger sister to visit the minister of one of the largest black churches in Detroit. It was mid-20th century America, and, abandoned years before by her…

Book review: “Bone on Bone” by Julia Keller

Book ReviewsAugust 21, 201836Views 0Likes 0Comments

Julia Keller’s latest novel Bone on Bone is a story of misery and love. It is the story of people whose lives are full of misery. Sometimes, for them, love ameliorates the pain. At other times, it feeds the pain. Like Keller’s six previous books in this series focused on the fictional town of Acker’s Gap in…

Essay: The death penalty and the evolution of faith

EssaysAugust 20, 201817Views 0Likes 0Comments

The Church’s understanding of what it means to live a Christian life has been evolving for 2,000 years and will continue to do so. For instance, the early Church accepted slavery as a permissible aspect of human society but later came to see bondage as immoral. Earlier this month, another step in the evolution of the Church’s…

Book review: “Wyrd Sisters” by Terry Pratchett

Book ReviewsAugust 15, 201871Views 0Likes 0Comments

That great and silly American writer Christopher Moore, in recent years, has mined the Shakespeare canon for sources for his comic novels. You could call this thievery. Or you could call it homage. Either way, the results are hilarious — Fool (a rip-off, excuse me, homage to King Lear) and The Serpent of Venice (Merchant of…

Book review: “Building A Revolutionary State: The Legal Transformation of New York, 1776-1783” by Howard Pashman

Book ReviewsAugust 13, 201827Views 0Likes 0Comments

For Great Britain, the late 18th-century conflict with its North American colonies was a civil war. The colonists were in rebellion and needed to be policed. For the newly minted United States of America, the Revolution was a war for independence. The colonists wanted to control their lives and fortunes. Either way you looked at it, however,…

Book review: “A Book of Silence” by Sara Maitland

Book ReviewsAugust 8, 201844Views 0Likes 0Comments

Since 2000, British writer Sara Maitland has been investigating, searching for, reaching for silence. Eight years through the still-ongoing process, she wrote about her endeavor in A Book of Silence. As part of this journey, Maitland has done 40 days and 40 nights of something approaching complete silence in a remote, isolated house in the far…

Poem: “The lost tribes”

PoemsAugust 6, 201837Views 0Likes 0Comments

The lost tribes for Haki Madhubuti I found the lost tribes in America, eating fries with city workers at the McDonald’s on Western Avenue. I found them sport-shopping at Gurnee Mills. I found them in the bleak hours on Ecclesiastes Road, in the cathedral’s unused confessionals, in the self-help section at the public library, after the wait, under the weight, over the rainbow, up the street, dedicated to the proposition, under…