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2024: Our Year in Books

R. R. Reno Carl R. Trueman Mark Bauerlein Dan Hitchens Valerie Stivers Peter J. Leithart John Byron Kuhner

R. R. Reno I was in a Goodwill in Denver when my eyes fell upon a paperback Penguin edition of Charles Dickens’s Bleak House. I bought it, and while...

The Independent Bookstore Versus Amazon

John Byron Kuhner

Politicians talk about helping small businesses. But what can they do? During the Covid lockdowns, one third of all American small businesses closed. They were already struggling. In Steubenville,...

Can the Ignatius Study Bible Save Biblical Studies?

John Byron Kuhner

The Ignatius Catholic Study Bible—a Bible decades in the making, under the editorship of Steubenville scholars Scott Hahn and Curtis Mitch—recently arrived in our bookstore. Students from the new...

The Enduring Essence of the Mets

John Byron Kuhner

I grew up in working-class New York City in the 1980s, which means I grew up with the ’86 Mets. The Mets, founded in 1962, had an unfair reputation...

Good News from an Independent Bookshop

John Byron Kuhner

A year and a half ago, our city’s one bookshop went up for sale. My wife and I bought it. The place had 20,000 books, a good music system that probably played...

Marlene Dietrich’s War on Nature

John Byron Kuhner

For some people, a timely warning can avert disaster. For others, it is a prophecy. The 1930 film Morocco, starring Marlene Dietrich as the nightclub singer Amy Jolly, is...

The Men Behind the Met

John Byron Kuhner

My grandfather died before I was born, and he remains to me a mostly mysterious figure. As is true of many people born poor who are committed to bettering...

I Bought A Haunted Bookshop

John Byron Kuhner

If you are ever in Steubenville, Ohio, that plucky burg of seedy steel mills and fresh-faced Catholic youth, it is to be hoped that you may chance upon the...

Sinéad O’Connor’s Cross

John Byron Kuhner

Sinéad O’Connor, the troubled Irish singer-songwriter, died in July at age fifty-six. No cause of death has been announced, but it is fair to note that at times she...

Angel of New York

John Byron Kuhner

On days when the world to me is desolation; when I cannot sit in my seat, or do any productive labor; when I have a terrible desire to be...

Rembert Weakland, Proud Vandal

John Byron Kuhner

Rembert Weakland, former archbishop of Milwaukee and the first American to serve as primate of the Benedictine Order, passed away earlier this week at the age of ninety-five. He...

Remembering Fr. Reginald Foster (1939–2020)

John Byron Kuhner

On December 25, shortly after midnight, while Catholics all over the Midwest were attending midnight mass, Fr. Reginald Thomas Foster, O.C.D., passed away in a Milwaukee nursing home, just...