As a follow-up to Friday's post on American Catholicism, Katherine A. Powers of the Boston Globe has reviewed O'Toole's book, calling it "a penetrating, deftly worked summary of organizational and liturgical developments, formal and informal, in the American Catholic Church with emphasis on the role and influence of the laity." The Faithful: A History of Catholics in America is out now from HUP.
On the occasion of Pope Benedict XVI's first visit to Boston, WBUR's "Here and Now" interviews James O'Toole, author of The Faithful: A History of Catholics in America, in which he tells the story of this ancient church from the perspective of ordinary Americans, the lay believers who have kept their faith despite persecution from without and clergy abuse from within.
Congratulations to Charles Taylor, whose 2007 book A Secular Age has won Christianity Today's Book Award for History/Biography.
Over at our Off the Page blog, Aviad Kleinberg, author of Flesh Made Word: Saints' Stories and the Western Imagination and the forthcoming The Seven Deadly Sins: A Very Partial List, has written a superlative essay on "the cultural uses of boredom." Excellent Friday reading.
For this week, they include:
||| More on My Dearest Friend: Letters of Abigail and John Adams.
||| More on A Secular Age.
Aziz Huq reviews Charles Taylor's A Secular Age for the American Prospect website:
In an idiosyncratic blend of the philosophical, the historical, and the speculative, Taylor describes the shift from a world brim-full with spirits and magic to a world where divinity is absent. His account resists the idea that the rise of secularism is a process of subtraction, of loss, and of disenchantment. Rather, Taylor describes secularity's birth as the migration of ideas, subtle changes in those ideas, and the opening of new possibilities. If Taylor's communitarian scholarship celebrated historical and social rootedness, A Secular Age is an encomium to the sheer happenstance of how those circumstances arose.
Charles Taylor's A Secular Age has made another big fall preview list, this time it's Marie Arana's in the Washington Post Book World. Taylor, the winner of the 2007 Templeton Prize, has crafted a magesterial work that takes stock of the Western world's long trajectory towards secularism, and what that change means for us in the larger scheme of things. According to Publishers Weekly, "Taylor's inspired combination of philosophy and history sparkles in this must-read virtuoso performance."
Writing in The Guardian newspaper this month, Matthew d'Ancona revealed that newly-minted British Prime Minister Gordon Brown has been turning to accounts of the CIA's Cold War "cultural front" such as Frances Stonor Saunders' Who Paid the Piper?: The CIA and the Cultural Cold War for inspiration as he crafts a strategy to win Islamic "hearts and minds" from the allure of extremism. Perhaps Mr. Brown should add to his list Hugh Wilford's forthcoming The Mighty Wurlitzer: How the CIA Played America, the first comprehensive account of the CIA's use of front groups in the West's ideological war on communism--a series of operations famously exposed by the 1967 Ramparts magazine article that blew the lid off the whole thing, causing no small amount of embarrassment and providing a preview of the scandals that were to tear the Agency apart during the 1970s. Covering the intelligence officers who masterminded the CIA's fronts as well as the involved citizen groups--émigrés, labor, intellectuals, artists, students, women, Catholics, African Americans, and journalists--Wilford provides a surprising analysis of Cold War society that contains valuable lessons for our own age of global conflict.
The Mighty Wurlitzer is scheduled for publication in January 2008. Incidentally, the mystery man half-featured on the book cover is none other than Allen W. Dulles, the Agency's Director from 1953 to 1961, when much of these shenanigans were ongoing.
Green Sisters: A Spiritual Ecology, Sarah McFarland Taylor's look into the burgeoning world of environmentally active Catholic nuns, is making waves in the blogosphere as the movement gains steam. And if yesterday's New York Times article on Christians, Jews and Muslims "who see food through a moral lens" is any indication, we could be seeing the beginning of a much larger trend in "spiritual ecology."
...will the battle never end? Mark Colvin interviews Michael Ruse, author of The Evolution-Creation Struggle, for Australian radio.
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