Fundamentally Religious and Catholic

Fundamentally Religious and Catholic

Tolkien’s Faith: A Spiritual Biography by Holly Ordway. Word on Fire Academic, 2023. Hardcover, 532 pages, $ 34.95. Reviewed by Adam Schwartz. J. R. R. Tolkien famously described The Lord of the Rings as a “fundamentally religious and Catholic work.”...
A Contemporary Literary Work of the Moral Imagination

A Contemporary Literary Work of the Moral Imagination

The Professor’s Dog and Other Stories  By David B. Schock. PenUltimate, Ltd., 2022. Paperback, 155 pages, $11.95. Reviewed by Jonathan R. Eller.  David B. Schock’s wide-ranging career as a newspaper editor, filmmaker, and non-fiction author draws inspiration from a...
Cormac McCarthy’s Historical Literary Influences

Cormac McCarthy’s Historical Literary Influences

Science and Literature in Cormac McCarthy’s Expanding Worlds  By Bryan Giemza. Bloomsbury Academic, 2023. Hardcover, 184 pages, $100. Reviewed by Philip D. Bunn. Works of scholarship on art, literature, or poetry can take multiple forms. One form might be scholarship...
Two Cities: The Public and the Private

Two Cities: The Public and the Private

A reflection on Dickens’s A Tale of Two Cities By Igor Damous. A solemn consideration, when I enter a great city by night, that every one of those darkly clustered houses encloses its own secret; that every room in every one of them encloses its own secret; that every...
Reading as a Spiritual Practice

Reading as a Spiritual Practice

Reading for the Love of God: How to Read as a Spiritual Practice By Jessica Hooten Wilson. Brazos Press, 2023. Hardcover, 208 pages, $24.99. Reviewed by James E. Hartley. “Until very recent years, civilized folk took it for granted that literature exists to form the...