This inspiring and fascinating memoir, subtitled, ‘The Autobiography of the Legendary Catholic Social Activist,’ The Long Loneliness is the late Dorothy Day’s compelling autobiographical testament to her life of social activism and her spiritual pilgrimage. A founder of the Catholic Worker Movement and long-time associate of Peter Maurin, Dorothy Day was eulogized in the New […]
The Long Loneliness by Dorothy Day Read More »
This is the definitive biography of one of the Christian Church’s most prominent figures. St. Augustine (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/St_Augustine) was born in A.D. 354 in the town of Thagaste in North Africa to a pagan father and a Christian mother. From these inauspicious beginnings, he would eventually become one of the most influential thinkers in the history of the
Augustine of Hippo by Peter Brown Read More »
In the 1960s within academic theology a movement emerged called ‘The Death of God’ theology (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Death_of_God_theology). Acknowledging the increasingly secular temper of the age, attempts were made to re-cast religious beliefs and theological notions in terms that could be accepted by secular minded people. The conviction was that religious belief and practice were not worthless
The Secular Meaning of The Gospel by Paul Van Buren Read More »
The ideas of deep thinkers in religion are often at great variance from those of the average congregational member. Here, John Macquarrie (d.2007, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Macquarrie and http://www.nytimes.com/2007/06/03/world/europe/03macquarrie.html?_r=0), Lady Margaret Professor of Divinity at Oxford, gives us a superb account of exactly those theories which have been at the frontiers of religious thought in the twentieth century. You
Twentieth Century Religious Thought by John Macquarrie Read More »
Andrew (‘A.N.’) Wilson (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andrew_Wilson_(writer and http://www.nytimes.com/1992/10/18/magazine/the-busy-busy-wasp.html) offered us, in 1999, this study in the decline of religious certainty. The book focuses on artists and intellectuals and covers Gibbon, Hume, Kant, Marx, Garibaldi, Bentham, George Eliot, Lenin, Tennyson, Carlyle, Darwin, Huxley, Shaw, Hardy, Hegel and Freud among others. Very good on the devastating sense of emotional loss
God’s Funeral by A.N. Wilson Read More »
How did an obscure Jewish religious sect in Roman occupied Judea go from nothing to become the world’s most dominant organised religion? Why did any one of the hundreds of other obscure cults such as Mithraism (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mithraism) not meet with the same success? There have been hundreds of histories of Christianity, each positioned somewhere along the spectrum
A History of Christianity by Diarmaid MacCulloch Read More »
