Grant Kaplan

The nineteenth century, for all but the most literal-minded, begins with the French Revolution and ends with the First World War. Or in the words of one influential overview of nineteenth-century Germany: “In the beginning was Napoleon.” At the end were trenches, tanks mired in mud, mustard gas, . . . . Continue Reading »

Sex and Secularism by joan wallach scott princeton, 240 pages, $27.95 While traveling in Spain about twenty years ago, I attended the nearest Ash Wednesday Mass I could find. Upon returning from the communion line, I realized that, aside from the priest, I was the only male present. Catholicism, it . . . . Continue Reading »

The Pope and the Professor:  Pius IX, Ignaz von Döllinger, and the Quandary of the Modern Age by thomas howardoxford, 312 pages, $45 John Henry Newman aside, Ignaz von Döllinger (1799–1890) was the greatest Catholic theologian of the nineteenth century. He came of age amid a golden . . . . Continue Reading »

Theologian Frederick Lawrence synthesizes the work of two twentieth-century giants: Bernard Lonergan and Hans-Georg Gadamer. Continue Reading »

Sabar investigated the seller of the artifact—a shady German fellow named Walter Fritz, whose varied exploits and proclivities make the characters in the Da Vinci Code seem downright conventional. A university dropout and part-time pornographer, Fritz managed to fabricate a Gnostic artifact that duped one of the world’s leading experts on early, extra-canonical Christianity, plus enough of her peers to satisfy the Harvard Theological Review. How did this happen? Perhaps the appeal of Gnosticism, for a certain type of scholar, made this artifact too good to check. Continue Reading »

Just weeks before the 2012 election, in a discussion held in the gymnasium of a small Midwestern Catholic college, the college’s president asked everyone to stand, turned to the large American flag hanging from the rafters, and asked the crowd to recite the Pledge of Allegiance with him. For him, . . . . Continue Reading »

René Girard is one of the most important Christian intellectuals of our time. Beginning with the publication of Deceit, Desire, and the Novel (1961), Girard’s thought began making waves in a number of disciplines. His first work impacted literary criticism with a basic and revolutionary . . . . Continue Reading »