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Regulars
Friday, 20 November 2009
To call Shlomo Sand's book "challenging" would be an understatement. The challenge begins with the English title: it goes further than a literal translation of the original Hebrew, which would be "When and How Was the Jewish People Invented?" What is undoubted is that what Sand is attempting to expose has wide appeal: it is unusual to find a book by a university academic labelled "International Bestseller". - Emma Klein, The Tablet
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Regulars
Tuesday, 17 November 2009
Today we usually seek novelty whenever we visit a bookshop. We are, as scholars sometimes put it, literary nomads, always in search of fresh pastures. This is the modern disease. During the medieval and early modern periods people were far more interested in looking backwards: to Rome, Greece and the Bible. - Jonathan Wright, The Catholic Herald
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Regulars
Wednesday, 11 November 2009
Perceptive, evenhanded, thought provoking, horizon expanding, remarkably well informed - words like these popped into my head as I read John L. Allen Jr's new book, The Future Church: How Ten Trends Are Revolutionising the Catholic Church. I thought I detected in his introduction a note of apology for writing as "a journalist, not a priest, theologian or academic." His credentials, as NCR readers know, are just fine. If you had doubts, the book will dispel them. - Fr John W. O'Malley, National Catholic Reporter
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Regulars
Monday, 02 November 2009
The Italian Chapel is described as a historical novel, but it is easy to imagine it as a film script or a television drama. Each chapter feels like a scene and, were I a movie producer looking for an idea based on a breathtakingly beautiful wind and rain swept location and which explored some of the deepest emotions and richest achievements of human beings, I would have found it in The Italian Chapel. - Philip Paris, Thinking Faith
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Regulars
Wednesday, 28 October 2009
Gavin D'Costa's theology is always both meticulously creative and creatively meticulous. This work recapitulates earlier studies but also offers a creative new twist to a key remaining issue for those who explicitly acknowledge a properly Christian revelation. - Gavin D'Costa, The Tablet
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Regulars
Wednesday, 21 October 2009
As the contributors to this book demonstrate, women are instructed from an early age that their value stems from their sexual allure and availability. No longer are young girls aspiring to a place in parliament or to shatter the glass ceiling in their local law firm. Nowadays, they are taught that real girl power is acquired in the bedroom. - Pauline Cooper, MercatorNet
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Regulars
Monday, 19 October 2009
Frontiers are times of opportunity but are also risky, raw and hard. Just as Pope John Paul II emphasised the opportunities of a "new humanity" as well as the pangs of giving birth to new life, in The City's Outback Gillian Cowlishaw shows both the life and the pangs of this new frontier: the hope and the despair, the visions and the realities, of Aboriginal life in this youthful, growing, struggling and fascinating part of Australia. - Fr Pat Mullins, Eureka Street
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Regulars
Friday, 16 October 2009
God's Philosophers has been criticised for reading like a textbook, but a textbook is exactly what is needed, both for those now studying and for those who have to unlearn what we were taught in textbooks written under the shadow of the authors of the great IXth Edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica. - Joe Egerton, Thinking Faith
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Regulars
Friday, 09 October 2009
The debate occasioned by the writings of the "new atheists", headed by Richard Dawkins, has become polarised, and the quality of argument, on both sides, has not always been very high, with many theologians and philosophers preferring to remain fastidiously aloof from the fracas. David Fergusson, however, finds the work of the new atheists "intensely interesting" and aims to establish "a conversation ... between those occupying the middle ground of scepticism and faith, where each side recognises that it has something to learn from the other." - John Cottingham, The Tablet
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Regulars
Monday, 05 October 2009
The late Brazilian Archbishop of Recife, Dom Helder Camara (1909 - 1999) was one of the great prophets of the twentieth century: living through an era of military dictatorship, he championed the poor of Brazil and the rest of the world, and influenced the Second Vatican Council, subsequent gatherings of Latin American Bishops, and even the latest papal encyclical, Caritas in Veritate. - John Battle, Thinking Faith
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