Books

Early on November 2, 1963, the then President of Vietnam, Ngo Dinh Diem, and his brother, Nhu, had just heard Holy Mass at a church in a suburb of Saigon. They had fled there the […]

During Lent 1998, a teenage girl, having just left an English convent school, knelt at the grotto of St. Jerome in the Holy Land. She prayed fervently, asking that through his intercession she would one […]

“That is a good book,” wrote Amos Bronson Alcott (1799-1888), the father of novelist Louisa May Alcott, “which is opened with expectation, and closed with delight and profit.” It’s also true, as the author of Ecclesiastes […]

Anthony Doerr’s All the Light We Cannot See, which won the 2015 Pulitzer Prize and has spent over 80 weeks on the New York Times Best Seller list, is one of the most beautiful and finely-crafted novels I have […]

This year marks the 750th anniversary of the birth of the great Catholic poet Dante Alighieri. Michelangelo reverenced Dante, as did Longfellow, Dorothy Sayers, and T.S. Eliot. In fact, it was Eliot who commented, “Dante and […]

It’s been a good reading year and I highly recommend the following to the readers on your Christmas (not “holiday”) shopping list: God or Nothing, by Cardinal Robert Sarah (Ignatius Press): It was the book […]

Contrary to what some people think, the word mythos is hardly a synonym for “lie” but rather suggests a symbolically-charged narrative which informs the moral imagination. Far from being inherently pernicious, myths are essential for […]

At the presentation of his new book Cardinal Robert Sarah said that Western society is rapidly forgetting God, and expressed his desire to help people rediscover him through both prayer and witness. “I would like […]

Editor’s note: The following interview was originally published on the Ignatius Press Novels website, which features reviews, interviews, and other information about Catholic fiction and novelists. Earlier this year, it was announced that the first annual […]

Several years ago, Father Raymond de Souza, one of my fellow faculty members at an annual Kraków-based summer seminar on Catholic social doctrine, made a trenchant observation about the city John Paul II used to […]