A few pages into The Delight of Being Ordinary I collapsed in a fit of nearly uncontrollable giggles. They were triggered in part by the situation with which Roland Merullo opens his novel (this is fiction, remember): Pope Francis and the Dalai Lama secretly escape from the holy confines of the Vatican through an ancient underground tunnel leading…

Are you tired of the political blame game, hearing those on the left blaming those on the right, and those on the right blaming those on the left? Of feeling impotent, because money rules the world? Are you fed up with the governmental paralysis that results from…

It is not only the German people who stood by, some even applauding, as Hitler and his Nazis first seized, then held on to power with vicious, unrelenting efficiency. Out of self-interest or self-preservation, the majority of Germans failed increasingly to challenge

…I do have a layman’s take on how we arrived at our current national nightmare. It’s just one, personal approach, and it’s conditioned in part by my having grown up in England since before World War II, and during the war and the post-war period, and particularly by what I know of my earliest years. I was born…

…here’s a book that fell into my hands which is one long “boyhood memory.” Hillbilly Elegy by J.D.Vance looks back on a deeply disturbed childhood growing up in the hillbilly country of the Appalachian mountains. Remarkable is the fact that he survived it, despite the odds…

In the opening scene in Jessica Elisa Boyd Art in Heaven, we find her protagonist, William, an Anglican priest, in a life-or-death crisis at the edge of a large body of water. At the end of the scene, in which we are invited to share his inner conflict in the vast and inscrutable context of nature itself, he reluctantly chooses…

…it surprised me to find this book by Sam Harris so helpful in my own search for a deeper meaning in life; and I was more surprised still to discover, halfway through, that Harris’s path had led him to the study and practice of…

This powerful and still most timely book was published in 2006, and it came to my attention by pure chance, as I searched through my shelves to see what could be donated to the local library. Here was one, I thought, that looked interesting, and set it aside to read. I have no idea how it reached…

Meet Carm Goode. Or Miles Forthwrighte. Or should I say “and,” since they appear to be one and the same […] You’ll note that Carm seems a jovial enough fellow, Miles a bit of a curmudgeon; Carm a free spirit, Miles clearly academic. Which seems to be how they work, not so much in collaboration as in friendly…

[…] look at it from the point of view of the lay reader—one who is not principally a student of either of those areas of scholarship. In this light, my first observation is that this is not a book to be read from cover to cover…