Whatever I am reading, whether fiction or fact, lowbrow or highbrow, it must take a back seat if I find a new Michael O'Brien novel. For some reason, his books are addictive.
The great American author Flannery O'Connor once remarked, "When people have told me that because I am a Catholic, I cannot be an artist, I have had to reply, ruefully, that because I am a Catholic, I cannot afford to be less than an artist."
There's a stranger in your house. On average, every day that stranger talks to our children more than most parents do in a month. We allow the stranger to teach them things and use language for which we would have a real stranger arrested.
Perhaps rather than a Catholic novel Evelyn Waugh's Brideshead Revisited should be called a sacramental novel in a particular sense.
As a writer of novels and occasional essays, Walker Percy is fascinated by our pilgrimage unto death. For autobiographical reasons, it is perhaps the most pervasive theme among the many in his writing.
The best physical description of Daniel Defoe comes to us, fittingly, from a wanted poster.
As the most immaterial art, music is often thought to be the most spiritual. By its nature, is music sacred? If so, what is sacred about it?
Wendell Berry, novelist, essayist, poet, and farmer, is a central contributor to the growing renaissance of Christian culture.
Originally the province of the French visionaries Mauriac and Bernanos, the Catholic novel has found exponents as various as are the many roads to Rome.
