Enjoy this book. Add it to your library. Treat it like its own little library, and enjoy the edification and education, challenge, and joy of reading Jim's informed cultural commentary on so many of our greatest writers, thinkers, and firebrands.--from the Introduction by James Martin, SJ

America columnist and Catholic cultural and literary critic, James T. Keane, brings together fifty varied voices--including some underappreciated ones--and reflects on their cultural, political, literary, and religious influence. His smart, accessible style brings thought leaders into conversation with a Catholic sensibility, opening unexpected insights into our current moment.

Among these fifty figures are John Kennedy Toole, Kirstin Valdez Quade, Dorothy Day, Jon Hassler, Mary Karr, Martin Amis, Toni Morrison, Graham Greene, Shusaku Endo, Andre Dubus III, Iris Murdoch, Colm Tóibín, J.F. Powers, Salman Rushdie, Mary Gordon, Wendell Berry, Thich Nhat Hanh, Sigrid Undset, Alice McDermott, and John Irving.

Reading Culture through Catholic Eyes combines Keane's breadth of knowledge of literary and cultural voices with a deep background in Catholic theology and spirituality. For general readers who appreciate lively and relevant writing, this book is a must-have.

A deeply felt exploration of the ways our favorite books can shape and heal us, from the host of Harry Potter and the Sacred Text.

Our favorite reads keep us company, give us hope, and help us find meaning in a chaotic world. In this fresh and relatable work, atheist chaplain Vanessa Zoltan blends memoir and personal growth as she grapples with the notions of family legacy and identity through the lens of her favorite novel, Jane Eyre. Informed by her training at the Harvard Divinity School and filtered through the pages of Jane Eyre as well as Little Women, Harry Potter, and The Great Gatsby, Zoltan explores topics ranging from the trauma she has inherited as the granddaughter of four Holocaust survivors to finding hope, meaning, and even magic in our deeply fractured times.

Brimming with a love of classic literature and the tenderness of self-reflection, the book also reveals simple techniques for reading any work as a sacred text--from Virginia Woolf to Anne of Green Gables to baseball scorecards.

Whether you're an avowed Eyrehead or a voracious reader and pop culture fan, this deeply felt and inspiring book will light the way to a more intimate appreciation for whatever books you love to read.

How can we share the Gospel and make disciples in our modern culture? Many people, including young people from Christian homes, are walking away from the faith, or have never had it presented to them in a compelling manner. However, our polemical, distracted media environment makes it difficult to have thoughtful discussions about anything. In this context, literature and the arts have a powerful role to play by providing an engaging and inviting way to share the Christian faith.

In Tales of Faith, Holly Ordway shows how literature--and especially old literature--can foster fruitful discussions that allow us to meet people where they are and help them move closer to knowing Christ, or to knowing and loving him more fully and deeply. Here, readers will find a practical, accessible guide to using literature to discuss topics such as the nature of God, virtues and vices, the Crucifixion, longing and sadness, and much more. For each literary text, Ordway provides an introductory essay, a selection from the text (or the whole poem for short pieces), questions for discussion or personal reflection, activities, and recommended resources.

• learn that the sufferings of the souls in hell are the natural consequences of the spiritual disorder of their sinful actions.
• develop a profound hatred for sin, not merely because it offends God, but because it will destroy your soul and thwart your happiness, both on earth and for eternity.
• observe the horrible punishments of the damned and be shocked into a state of enlightened self-interest.
• armed with the knowledge of what sin does to us, resolve to fight against it with all your strength.
• realize that this literary journey through hell is intended to lead you to heaven.

Professing Darkness confirms the centrality of Catholic thought, imagery, and sacrament to the spiritual and ethical outlook of the work of Cormac McCarthy and, more specifically, its consistent assessment of Enlightenment values and their often-catastrophic realization in American history. D. Marcel DeCoste surveys McCarthy's fiction from both his Tennessee and Southwest periods, with chapters devoted to eight of his published novels--from Outer Dark to The Road--and a conclusion that examines the writer's screenplay for The Counselor and the duology of The Passenger and Stella Maris.

DeCoste's attentive, wide-ranging interpretations demonstrate that McCarthy's work mounts a sustained critique of core Enlightenment ideals and their devastating results in the American context, especially for Indigenous peoples, the environment, the viability of community, and the integrity of a self irreducible to the status of a commodity. Professing Darkness shows that Roman Catholic understandings of Penance and Eucharist, along with specific Catholic teachings--such as those regarding the goodness of Creation, the nature of evil, the insufficiency of the self, and the radical invitation to conversion--enable McCarthy's revelatory engagement with American Enlightenment.

An important contribution to the ever-expanding critical literature on a towering contemporary author, Professing Darkness offers an innovative reading of both the spiritual and political valences of McCarthy's writing.

The Church of England was at the heart of Jane Austen's world of elegance and upheaval. Fashionable Goodness: Christianity in Jane Austen's England explores the church's role in her life and novels, the challenges that church faced, and how it changed the world. In one volume, this book brings together resources from many sources to show the church at a pivotal time in history, when English Christians were freeing enslaved people, empowering the poor and oppressed, and challenging society's moral values and immoral behavior.

Readers will meet Anglicans, Dissenters, Evangelicals, women leaders, poets, social reformers, hymn writers, country parsons, authors, and more. Lovers of Jane Austen or of church history and the long eighteenth century will enjoy discovering all this and much more:

• Why could Mr. Collins, a rector, afford to marry a poor woman, while Mr. Elton, a vicar, and Charles Hayter, a curate, could not?
• Why did Mansfield Park's early readers (unlike most today) love Fanny Price?
• What part did people of color, like Miss Lambe of Sanditon, play in English society?
• Why did Elizabeth Bennet compliment her kind sister Jane on her candour?
• What shirked religious duties caused Anne Elliot to question the integrity of her cousin William Elliot?
• Which Austen characters exhibited true honor, false honor, or no honor?
• How did William Wilberforce, Hannah More, and William Cowper (beloved poet of Marianne Dashwood and Jane Austen) bring goodness into fashion?
• How did the French Revolution challenge England's complacency and draw the upper classes back to church?
• How did Christians campaigning to abolish the slave trade pioneer modern methods of working for social causes?

Explore the church of Jane Austen's world in Fashionable Goodness: Christianity in Jane Austen's England.

Forty years as a poet has kept Robert Cording looking at the details of everyday experience. That long labor has brought him face-to-face with the inescapable complexity of a world that is full of suffering and injustice. And grace.

This journey has convinced him that, as Czeslaw Milosz puts it, poetry embodies the double life of our common human circumstance as beings in between the dust that we are and the divinity to which we would aspire. Cording's task has therefore been to evoke what he calls the primordial intuitions of Christianity that we live in a world we did not create; that God's immanent presence is capable of breaking in on us at every moment; that most of the time we cannot taste and see that presence because we live in a world of mirrors; that only by attention can we live in the world but outside of our existing conceptions of it.

The reflections in Finding the World's Fullness--comprising not only thoughts on metaphor but also close readings of poets ancient and modern, including George Herbert, Robert Browning, Elizabeth Bishop, and Stanley Kunitz--suggest that, as Richard Wilbur puts it, The world's fullness is not made but found.

Near then and here now...

Jesus references within the Gospels that the Kingdom of God is near, as does John the Baptist. Many in Scripture had encountered the Kingdom of God. God is spirit and resides within His domain, His Kingdom. He reached out many times throughout scriptural history to numerous people such as Abram, Joseph, Moses, the prophets, and David, to name a few.

These encounters with the Kingdom, profound occurrences as they were, did not constitute entry. However, Jesus the Messiah changed everything. He paid the price for the world's sin, set the captives free, and most importantly, established His Kingdom, giving explicit details within the Gospels as to what the Kingdom is, its purpose, and how one may enter.

The establishment of the Kingdom at Pentecost began to be lost shortly thereafter, and we born-again believers will witness its reemergence in these last days.

WINNER OF THE PEN/MARTHA ALBRAND AWARD FOR FIRST NONFICTION
FINALIST FOR THE NATIONAL BOOK CRITICS CIRCLE AWARD FOR BIOGRAPHY
NAMED A BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR BY THE ATLANTIC AND SAN FRANCISCO CHRONICLE

Thomas Merton was a Trappist monk in Kentucky; Dorothy Day the founder of the Catholic Worker in New York; Flannery O'Connor a Christ-haunted literary prodigy in Georgia; and Walker Percy a doctor in Louisiana who had quit medicine in order to write. Although they never met as a group, for three decades they read one another's work, corresponded, and grappled with what Percy called a predicament shared in common their
desire to reconcile the claims of faith and art. A friend came up with a name for them--the School of the Holy Ghost.

The Life You Save May Be Your Own is Paul Elie's now-classic group portrait of these four writers and the artistic and religious milieu they made their own. It is a riveting history of America's first Catholic literary moment--as the four go on pilgrimage from the God-obsessed literary past of Dante and Dostoevsky out into the chaos of postwar American life. It is a narrative of the ways faith took on forms the faithful could not have anticipated--
through memoir and modernist fiction, in soup kitchens and street protests. And it is a story about the ways we look to great books and writers to help us make sense of our experience.

With a new afterword by the author, The Life You Save May Be Your Own demonstrates the power of great writing to change--and save--our lives.

What is the Christian literary imagination? That question was put to the writers who have contributed to this collection of essays. They were asked, in answering it, to choose and write about a work of literature that seemed to them to illustrate one of the varied ways in which the Christian imagination sees the world, to define by example the meaning of the term. A variety of beliefs (or indeed unbeliefs) are expressed by the contributors and authors they selected to discuss. But what the essays have in common is an inquiry into the nature of belief and the means by which the reader's imagination can itself be stirred through the work of the author under discussion.

The book is structured chronologically, with essays on literature ranging from Anglo-Saxon England to 21st-Century America, but the contributors show a freedom of movement and reference across the centuries in their essays, sometimes deliberately juxtaposing the historical with the contemporary. What emerges from the collection is a shared inquiry into the enduring Christian vision of God's engagement with the world.

The Bible source Book can help make you a better Bible Student. A Bible student's tools are his Bible and his books. Here is a handy volume offering a number of methods of personal Bible study, along with well-organized outlines of all the major Bible doctrines designed to answer your questions as you study. A concise Bible dictionary quickly defines many of the words Bible Students stumble over. A practical handbook for anyone--especially new Christians.

Manalive details the story of Mr. Innocent Smith, a new tenant at a London boarding house, who uses a great wind that follows him to breathe life into the residents at Beacon House. Mr. Innocent Smith uses his comedic nature and eccentric antics to charm the other tenants easily, transforming the bleak atmosphere of the boarding house into one full of childlike joy. However, despite the happiness that Smith brings, when he is accused of a whole slew of crimes, everyone turns on him without a second thought. While Manalive is a book about searching for the truth, it is also about faith, with or without doubt. G. K. Chesterton delivers his message through incredible descriptions, colorful characters, and a storyline that will keep you on your toes.

Light-hearted and funny, Manalive is a mystery novel that blends philosophy and theology, a style English author G. K. Chesterton is revered for. It is for good reason he is known as the prince of paradox.

Taking its title from a poem of William Butler Yeats, this collection of essays focuses on Adam's Curse--the burdens and harsh conditions that, as Denis Donoghue underscores throughout, make any human achievement difficult. As he says, those conditions include at various levels of reference the Fall of Man, categorical failure, loss, the limitations inscribed so insistently in human life that they seem to be in the nature of things, like death and weather. But hope is never ruled out, as Donoghue reminds us of the possibility of putting up with the conditions and turning them to some account.

It is the putting up with the conditions and turning them to some account--a post-lapsarian struggle fraught with religious questions--that most interests Donoghue. These essays, which are explorations of both faith and literary works that engage faith, address a dazzling range of texts and writers: Yeats, Milton, Larkin, Heaney, Emmanuel Levinas, Alasdair MacIntyre, John Crowe Ransom, Henry Adams, William Lynch's Christ and Apollo, and Robert Bellah's Beyond Belief, among others. Common to all is an alertness to the social bearing of literature and the role it plays in relation to politics, religion, and especially ethics. What emerges, for Donoghue, is the need to restore the primacy of theology and church doctrine without evading the dark parts of the Old and New Testaments.

Through his probing, reflective encounters with philosophical and religious issues, we witness a magisterial intelligence at work.

In the late Enlightenment, a new imperative began to inform theories of interpretation: all literary texts should be read in the same way that we read the Bible. However, this assumption concealed a problem--there was no coherent we who read the Bible in the same way. In Secularism and Hermeneutics, Yael Almog shows that several prominent thinkers of the era, including Johann Gottfried Herder, Moses Mendelssohn, Immanuel Kant, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, and Friedrich Daniel Ernst Schleiermacher, constituted readers as an imaginary we around which they could form their theories and practices of interpretation. This conception of interpreters as a universal community, Almog argues, established biblical readers as a coherent collective.

In the first part of the book, Almog focuses on the 1760s through the 1780s and examines these writers' works on biblical Hebrew and their reliance on the conception of the Old Testament as a cultural, rather than religious, asset. She reveals how the detachment of textual hermeneutics from confessional affiliation was stimulated by debates on the integration of Jews in Enlightenment Germany. In order for the political community to cohere, she contends, certain religious practices were restricted to the private sphere while textual interpretation, which previously belonged to religious contexts, became the foundation of the public sphere. As interpretive practices were secularized and taken to be universal, they were meant to overcome religious difference. Turning to literature and the early nineteenth century in the second part of the book, Almog demonstrates the ways in which the new literary genres of realism and lyric poetry disrupted these interpretive reading practices. Literary techniques such as irony and intertextuality disturbed the notion of a stable, universal reader's position and highlighted interpretation as grounded in religious belonging.

Secularism and Hermeneutics reveals the tension between textual exegesis and confessional belonging and challenges the modern presumption that interpretation is indifferent to religious concerns.