The composition of didactic fiction is a risky undertaking. Plots, characters, and the setting of scenes can easily become tools with which a writer makes his points pure means rather than subordinate ends that in […]
Perhaps the second best-known martyrdom in the history of the Anglophone world is St. Thomas Becket, killed in Canterbury Cathedral during Vespers at the hands of four knights motivated by King Henry II of England’s […]
St. Bernadette Subirous once complained that writings about saint’s lives tend to focus on anything but the often long and slow process by which their lives of prayer and of virtue developed day by day, […]
It is tempting to use Jose Luis Olaizola’s Bartolomé de las Casas: Chronicle of a Dream as a backdrop for yet another look at the history of the relationship between ethnically European Catholics and non-European […]
Few Catholics today will deny that the literary output of contemporary Catholics, excellent as some of it is, does not (as a total body of work) approach the level of accomplishment achieved between the beginning […]
When, several years ago, my wife first asked me to watch Downton Abbey with her, I was somewhat skeptical. A television show which had become that much of a fad seemed unlikely to be particularly worthwhile […]
In 1952 Evelyn Waugh visited Goa to attend celebrations marking the four hundredth anniversary of the death of Saint Francis Xavier. Impressed by the devout and traditionally orthodox but distinctly non-European religiosity of the local […]
When asked if she thought that college creative writing programs stifle too many aspiring authors, Flannery O’Connor said that the real problem is that they don’t stifle nearly enough of them. That such programs do […]
Like many others, I was pleasantly surprised by the contents of Querida Amazonia, which, if not without concerning features, is almost incomparably better than was widely expected. Greater reflection has, however, led me to think […]
When the future Monsignor Ronald Knox first told a Catholic priest of his desire to convert to Catholicism, the reason he gave was that, in his exact words, the Anglican Church didn’t have “a leg […]
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