John P. Sisk

Sin and Censorship: The Catholic Church and the Motion Picture Industry By Frank Walsh. Yale University Press, 394 pages, $35 Few of the Catholics who in the 1930s and 1940s stood up at mass to pledge their willingness to let the Legion of Decency decide which movies they would not see were in no . . . . Continue Reading »

The late avant-garde composer John Cage once urged as a basic principle that we “choose abundance rather than scarcity. Be wasteful, rather than pinchpenny. Get as much as you can out of all there is to be had. Have it even if you don’t use it, or even if you use it badly as a gadget.” . . . . Continue Reading »

Into the Wild By Jon Krakauer Villard, 207 pages, $22 Jon Krakauer has written a thoroughly familiar American story. Its central figure, a recent college graduate named Chris McCandless, is spiritually ill at ease in his well-to-do East Coast bourgeois home and strikes out on his own, impelled by a . . . . Continue Reading »

After suffering through elementary arithmetic, geometry, algebra, and trigonometry it is easy to believe with the Pythagoreans that everything is number, or with St. Matthew that “the very hairs of your head are numbered.” Inclined as they were to be mystic about their numbers, the Pythagoreans . . . . Continue Reading »

According to a recent Gallup poll, 52 percent of people say they believe in the Devil. One can imagine that this slim majority is not good news for the Devil, who after all is not running for public office. In the Christian tradition he is utterly insatiable and wants it all. But he may be more . . . . Continue Reading »

Culture of Complaint: The Fraying of America by robert hughes oxford university press, 210 pages, $19.95 This book immerses us in the discontents that derive from our sexual, ethnic, racial, economic, political, moral, and religious differences. Yet again we are taken over the familiar and . . . . Continue Reading »

In the Fall 1991 issue of New Perspectives Quarterly , which is very usefully devoted to the problems of unity and diversity in the contemporary world, Isaiah Berlin observes that the twentieth century is “the worst century that Europe has ever had.” Certainly there is widespread . . . . Continue Reading »

What Joan Shelley Rubin aims to do in The Making of Middlebrow Culture is “redress the disregard and oversimplification of middlebrow culture in the 1920s, 1930s, and 1940s by illuminating the values and attitudes that shaped some of its major expressions.” Thus she lets us know at . . . . Continue Reading »

In this highly individualistic age, it is probably safe to assume about every victim what Tolstoy at the beginning of Anna Karenina assumes about every unhappy family: that each is unhappy in his or her own way. This could mean that to think about victimization now is to be overwhelmed with an . . . . Continue Reading »

It is not hard to imagine the common sense reaction to the news that a distinguished historian had attempted to cover the history of human suffering in a little over two hundred pages. What have humans ever thought, done, or made that is not directly or indirectly involved with suffering in one or . . . . Continue Reading »