J. A. Gray

The new movie with Tom Hanks as James Bond and the Catholic Church as SMERSH is about to hit the theatres, if you care. It is called Angels & Demons , or The Further Awful Disclosures of Maria Monk as told to Dan Brown and Exhibited in a Narrative of The Secret Deeds of the Roman Church . From . . . . Continue Reading »

A public school in California brings in a lesbian to speak to the students about her homosexuality. Parents, finding out about it after the fact, ask the school to reveal to them what was said. The school claims that it need not inform the parents as to what transpired in their children’s . . . . Continue Reading »

It’s hard to miss Mr. Fox these days. The diminutive actor who runs the Michael J. Fox Foundation for Parkinson’s Research has a new book in print and a television special airing on May 7, and he is doing endless interviews to promote his cause. His cause is to find a cure for . . . . Continue Reading »

On Beauty by zadie smith penguin, 464 pages, $15 (paperback) In On Beauty, British writer Zadie Smith has turned her attention to the post-September 11 United States and has been widely praised for the result, which is a big comic novel that builds a topical tale on a classic foundation. . . . . Continue Reading »

Death of an Ordinary Man: A Novel by Glen Duncan Grove. 320 pp. $13 paper. “As soon as the soul is set free from the body it is either plunged into hell or soars to heaven,” wrote that doctor of the Church, St. Thomas Aquinas back in the thirteenth century, “unless it be held back by . . . . Continue Reading »

Gilead by Marilynne Robinson Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 247 pp. $23. Marilynne Robinson’s Housekeeping, published in 1981, is an extraordinary work of art, and many readers have waited impatiently for Robinson to publish a second novel. I’m among them, although I’ve waited more in dread than . . . . Continue Reading »

Artistic License: Three Centuries of Good Writing and Bad Behavior by brooke allen ivan r. dee, 244 pages, $26 I’ll write because I’ll give You, critics, means to live; For should I not supply The cause, th’effect would die. Robert Herrick’s quatrain is a reminder which critics do well to . . . . Continue Reading »

The America of the title is the United States, from colonial times to the present. The Jesus of the title is all the things the subtitle says and more. To Jesus’ question “Who do you say that I am?” Americans have offered seemingly numberless and often contradictory replies. In Jesus . . . . Continue Reading »