Bill Donohue As a sociologist and a Catholic activist, I was anxious to read American Grace by Harvard’s Robert D. Putnam and Notre Dame’s David E. Campbell. I was not disappointed: it is the most impressive volume on religion and public life to be published in many years. The subtitle of the book, How Religion Divides [...]
Ronald J. Rychlak George Weigel’s magnificent biography of Pope John Paul II, Witness to Hope, was published in 1999. Knowing that the pope’s story was not over, Weigel promised that he would one day write a completion. This is it, and it is a powerful and welcome compliment to the earlier biography, but it is much more [...]
Laura E. Finnegan A Guy’s Guide to the Good Life: Virtues for Men by Robert Lockwood. St. Anthony Messenger Press, 2009. We are all looking for answers to the same, age-old questions: how can I live my life better? How can I be a better person? It seems we have found a short, enjoyable, and educational volume [...]
Kenneth D. Whitehead Hitler, the War, and the Pope (Revised and Expanded) by Ronald J. Rychlak. Our Sunday Visitor, 2010. University of Mississippi Professor of Law Ronald J. Rychlak published a book ten years ago with the same title as that shown above. This new book, just published, is presented ten years later as a “revised and [...]
Robert P. Lockwood Pope Benedict XVI and the Sexual Abuse Crisis: Working for Reform and Renewal by Gregory Erlandson and Matthew Bunson. Our Sunday Visitor, 2010. Available at www.osv.com The title doesn’t make you want to read it—Pope Benedict XVI and the Sexual Abuse Crisis. The daily carpet-bombing of the Church in media has given us more than [...]
Joseph A. Varacalli, Ph.D. John Paul II: Confronting the Language Empowering the Culture of Death by William Brennan. Sapientia Press, 2008. Available on Amazon.com Language both shapes and is shaped by society and its social movements, organizations, and individuals. To this must be added the reality of “power”: just who and what has the ability to generate [...]
Bill Donohue Kiss It Good-Bye: The Mystery, the Mormon, and the Moral of the 1960 Pittsburgh Pirates by John Moody. Shadow Mountain, 2010. Available on Amazon.com It’s April, and that means it’s time for baseball. Fans of all teams will be drawn to John Moody’s inspiring volume, and this is especially true of those from Western [...]
Patrick G.D. Riley Mass Misunderstandings: The Mixed Legacy of the Vatican II Liturgical Reforms by Kenneth D. Whitehead. St. Augustine’s Press, 2009. Order online at www.staugustine.net or your favorite online bookseller. The subtitle presents the burden of this highly informative book. Not every liturgical reform given us by the Second Vatican Council sat well with the [...]
Dinesh D’Souza Life After Death: The Evidence By Dinesh D’Souza. Regnery Publishing, 2009. Order online at www.regnery.com or your favorite bookseller. Many cultures and religions affirm life after death but only one asserts that someone actually died and returned to life. This claim is made exclusively by Christianity. No one says of Moses or Muhammad that after their deaths [...]
Kenneth D. Whitehead What Happened to Notre Dame? By Charles E. Rice. South Bend, IN: St. Augustine’s Press, 2009. Order online at www.staugustine.net or your favorite online bookseller. Many people were shocked when the University of Notre Dame, long thought to be America’s premier Catholic university, in May, 2009, invited President Barack Obama to be its commencement speaker [...]
