There is a lot that Simon Schama wants to say in The Story of the Jews: Finding the Words: 1000 BC–1492 AD, the first of a three-volume history. And maybe there’s too much. What I mean is that Schama, a noted historian who is Jewish, is may be...
Joan of Arc was a mystic and a saint with a sense of humor. George H. Tavard — the great Catholic theologian and one of the first to take a deeper look into the role of women in the history of the Church — recalls two of her quips in his essay in...
Kids go to school and learn things like geometry and the Magna Carta and chromosomes and similes and square roots and Franklin D. Roosevelt, but none of their textbooks has much to say about parenting. If educators and the American society that...
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 document ever written. It would be difficult to find any 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 years and years down the line, he adds: Note to future generations...
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 existential novel in which the main characters strive purposefully through life only to...
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 city, usually Chicago. So it is with Lucy Gayheart, written in 1935, as I ...
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 to the real world in some way so that the fantastic story can comment on the...
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