Various

The Swallows of Capistrano I am grateful for Joseph Bottum’s “When the Swallows Come Back to Capistrano: Catholic Culture in America” (October 2006). Trying to get a handle on the state of the Catholic Church in the United States is a monstrous task, and Bottum’s article is . . . . Continue Reading »

Simply Christian: Why Christianity Makes Sense by N.T. Wright HarperSanFrancisco, 256 pages, $22.95 Speaking very generally, Christian apologists can go down one of two roads: Friedrich Schleiermacher’s or Blaise Pascal’s. According to Schleiermacher, man’s inchoate sense of absolute . . . . Continue Reading »

Scoured or Skimmed? Alan Jacobs claims to have “scoured” the pages of Shadowplay in a vain search for answers to its anomalies (“The Code Breakers,” August/September). Skimmed would be a more accurate word. Objecting to my suggestion that Merchant of Venice contains an . . . . Continue Reading »

Nine Bells God in His mercy gave the heavens as a clock to sailors he would save.Driven by wind and wave, I steer for Peter’s rock and moor within his nave, seeking the faith to brave my first mate in a smock and sawbones looking grave. Timothy Murphy Signs and Portents, Read from the Margin . . . . Continue Reading »

Ambrose’s Patriarchs: Ethics for the Common Man by Marcia L. Colish University of Notre Dame Press, 208 pages, $15 (paper) Unless one is a regular and diligent reader of the Pentateuch, the stories of the patriarchs in Genesis are known chiefly through vignettes: Abraham and Sarah learning . . . . Continue Reading »

Jacques and Raïssa Maritain. by Jean-Luc Barré. Notre Dame University Press, 528 pages, $50. First published ten years ago, this was the first true biography of Jacques Maritain, and it has had no rivals since. There have been memoirs, there have been monographs, there have been studies galore of . . . . Continue Reading »

Fostering Care I read with great interest Gregory Popcak’s “Misplacing Children” (June/July). As the father of four adopted children and as a leader of an adoption ministry at our local evangelical church, adoption occupies a central place in the life of our family. I, too, am . . . . Continue Reading »

The Dead Are With Us The dead are with us when they sing. Though we can’t see them anymore, they sing in very little things.They sing in clinking wedding rings, in zippers of the clothes they wore. The dead are with us. When they sing,we hear their teaspoons jangling in the corners of our . . . . Continue Reading »

Farr Gone on Religion In response to Thomas F. Farr’s “The Diplomacy of Religious Freedom” (May): Before a temporary assignment to Vietnam and Indonesia last year, I received a briefing by the State Department’s office of religious freedom, then directed by Ambassador Farr. . . . . Continue Reading »

The Conservative Poets: A Contemporary Anthology. edited by William Baer. Evansville Univ. Press, 182 pages, $20. To refute Lionel Trilling’s assertion that there is no significant conservative imagination at work in America, William Baer has assembled twelve contemporary conservative poets. . . . . Continue Reading »