Digging Up the Bones of Empire

TO THE POINT: WEDNESDAY, NOVEMBER 19, 1969 We moderns still are uncovering the tremendous remains of the Roman Empire, which extended from what is now Iraq to what is now Scotland, and from what is now Morocco to what is now West Germany. What modern man cannot...

To Paradise, By Way of Kensal Green

The English Way: Studies in English Sanctity from St. Bede to Newman Edited by Maisie Ward, introduction by Bradley J. Birzer. Cluny Media, [1933] 2016. Paperback, 366 pages, $19. You might expect a book called The English Way: Studies in English Sanctity from Bede to...

The Road to ‘Reunion’ Examined

On the front page of L’Osservatore Romano, English, for November 4, 2016, we find two headlines occasioned by the Holy Father’s trip to Sweden on the five hundredth anniversary of the Reformation. One headline reads: “On the Path toward Full Communion,” while the...

Heroism Was Still Possible

¡No Pasarán!: Writings from the Spanish Civil War edited by Pete Ayrton. Pegasus, 2016. Hardcover, 448 pages, $26. Reviewed by Helen Andrews Let it stand uncontested that the term “cultural appropriation” is political correctness of the cheapest and most manipulative...
Passos and Century’s End

Passos and Century’s End

Century’s Ebb: The Thirteenth Chronicle by John Dos Passos. Gambit, 1975. Hardcover, 474 pages. Publico ergo damnatus. —John Dos Passos, May 23, 1970 Reviewed by Pedro Blas González John Rodrigo Dos Passos (1896-1970) is a writer with an expansive view of man, of...

Fall Newsletter features new Society for Law and Culture

The Fall 2016 Permanent Things features news of the inaugural conference of a new Kirk Center initiative, the Society for Law and Culture; an emerging partnership with the new publishing house, Cluny Media; and news of other recent events and publications.

A Samurai’s Hidden Gospel

A Christian Samurai: The Trials of Baba Bunkō by William J. Farge, SJ; Foreword by Kevin M. Doak. The Catholic University of America Press, 2016. Hardcover, 336 pages, $35. For decades, the standard American academic treatment of Japanese Christianity has been that...

Taking Things as They Are

Mr. Blue by Myles Connolly with an introduction by Stephen Mirarchi. Cluny Media, 2015. Paper, 198+xiv pages, $18. This new edition of Myles Connolly’s 1928 Catholic novella Mr. Blue invites comment on the state of relations between Roman Catholicism and American...

Sightings of an Endangered Species

Poetry Night at the Ballpark and Other Scenes from an Alternative America: Writings, 1986–2014 by Bill Kauffman. Front Porch Republic Books, 2015. Paperback, 442 pages, $51.To say that Bill Kauffman’s collection of essays, Poetry Night at the Ballpark, comes from a...

Books in Little: Those Intolerable Christians

Destroyer of the Gods: Early Christian Distinctiveness in the Roman World by Larry W. Hurtado. Baylor University Press, 2016. Hardback, 304 pages, $30. In his well-received and influential works, How on Earth did Jesus Become a God?: Historical Questions about...