This is not a book review, it’s a complaint.I have been reading—and, I confess, enormously enjoying—David Halberstam’s The Fifties (Villard), yet another of his blockbuster best-sellers. It’s great nostalgia, wonderfully evocative, and above all, about my generation. Like . . . . Continue Reading »
There is liberalism, and then there is liberalism. We in the post-Communist societies of Central and Eastern Europe, and especially we in Poland, do not have an easy time sorting out the varieties of liberalism that are being proposed to us. . . . . Continue Reading »
Past Imperfect: French Intellectuals 1944–56 by tony judt university of california press, 348 pages, $30 The political attitudes of French intellectuals with respect to war, repression, and especially Russian Communism in the decade immediately following the war is an amazing story. In Tony Judt, . . . . Continue Reading »
God’s Politician: Pope John Paul II, the Catholic Church, and the New World Order by david willey st. martin’s, 258 pages, $18.95 Fifteen years ago, as the long pontificate of Paul VI drew to a close, a consensus on the qualifications for the next pope began to take shape among liberal Catholic . . . . Continue Reading »
It is now well over three years since the fall of Communism in Eastern Europe. Scenes of Polish workers carrying Lech Walesa triumphantly on their shoulders, of students dancing on top of the Berlin Wall, and of throngs cheering Vaclav Havel in Wenceslas Square have been replaced by sickening images . . . . Continue Reading »
Over the past decade, Father Thomas J. Reese, S.J., a fellow of the Woodstock Theological Center in Washington, has become perhaps the most dogged, and certainly the most prolific, Catholic bishop-watcher in the United States. Collecting and retailing stories about bishops has a long history, of . . . . Continue Reading »
“Those who deny freedom to others deserve it not for themselves,” wrote Abraham Lincoln. Is there any American of sound mind who would not endorse this statement? Yet things having to do with freedom are not always so clear. The crucial case of religious freedom, celebrated by Pope John Paul II . . . . Continue Reading »
Iam a Catholic, but I married Protestant. My husband has steeped me in Protestant lore: Protestants get results. Protestants think ahead. Protestants save (Catholics spend). My Protestant in-laws had to endure our Catholic wedding, their faces rigid with polite distress as they took in the crucifix . . . . Continue Reading »
In the years 1975-76, Catholics attending Mass anywhere in the state of Montana would have heard the priest pray for “Paul, our Pope, and Eldon, our Bishop.” Apart from the fact that outside of Montana there has never been a Catholic bishop in the United States named Eldon, there was nothing . . . . Continue Reading »
In his witty and affectionate autobiography, Ours: The Making and Unmaking of a Jesuit, the Islamicist F. E. Peters has this to say about his Jesuit training: “It was a marvelous nineteenth century English university education of the type that Arnold Toynbee believed he was among the . . . . Continue Reading »
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