My review of Margot Singer’s wonderful essay collection, Secret Agent Man. What if our homes help prolong our lives? asks one of Margot Singer’s haunting essays in Secret Agent Man. Even after being away for years, she thinks of her childhood house in Cochituate, Massachusetts, as an anchor and feels comforted to find her parents still embedded… Continue reading The Home We Can and Cannot Leave
“Apologetics, Christian or other, is always a risky enterprise,” the late Stanley L. Jaki once wrote. “Once caught in apologetic zeal, one can, especially if one is a historian, easily overshoot the target.” It was a characteristically shrewd insight, and one that might be applied to certain aspects of Jaki’s own remarkable career.
My review of Gareth Gore’s engrossing exposé of Opus Dei in U.S. Catholic.
“From a theoretical point of view, the search for a compromise between reason and religion marks the evolution of Christian thought and nourishes the philosophy of the church fathers, from Saint Augustine to Saint Thomas. Seen from the point of view of a modern scientist, these efforts have a kind of desperate, tragic grandeur. Other… Continue reading Carlo Rovelli on Reason and Faith
One of my favorite lines from one of Anthony Burgess’s greatest (and underappreciated) novels. “Mrs. Killigrew, whose husband played bridge all the time, discovered a passion for a man whose face was covered with warts. Why was this? In a story you had to find a reason, but real life gets on very well without… Continue reading Book Notes
