Paul Lakeland

Book review: The best things about American Catholics: A History are the attention given to North America's early years, and the careful focus on ordinary Catholics, rather than the exploits of bishops and clergy.

Book review: Jack is a beautiful if improbable biracial love story, full of joy and sadness, but complicated from the start by its setting in Southern cities in the days of Jim Crow.

Book review: In Longing for an Absent God, Nick Ripatrazone makes a good case for at least the vestiges of Catholic impulses in the work of his selection of novelists. But he doesn't quite connect the dots.

Book Review: This book is recommended to anyone who struggles to understand the meaning of the Second Vatican Council and who is not enlightened by the polarized antagonisms of recent decades. 

Review: At the heart of Christian Wiman's He Held Radical Light: The Art of Faith, the Faith of Art is neither memoir nor poems, but rather an exploration of the possible relationships between poetry and faith.

Book Review: We live in a world where the secular and the religious exist side by side, where they might and should dialogue, and indeed where the denizens of a religious worldview also inhabit the saeculum.  

Book Review: With the election of Pope Francis, author Paul Collins evidently thinks that the time is right for a fairly trenchant review of two centuries of the papacy and that the papacy of Francis is illuminated by the historical discussion.

Book review: In the face of society's declining religious belief, Fr. Paul Crowley offers the image of an unmoored God. In dislocation, one might say, both the believer and God find their truer selves.

Book Review: Everyone leads, not just because that is a structural necessity if we are going to revitalize our church, but because this is simply one aspect of being a baptized Christian.