THE EDUCATION OF HENRY ADAMS by Henry Adams how to share a life with an original thinker. His book on Chartres etc well worn. This one less so. THE VARIETIES OF RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE by William James I wondered how so many American writers knew John of the Cross (Hemingway AND TS Eliot) and this book [...]

Books I will never finish: Mann’s Magic Mountain. Utterly seduced by this book, I am afraid to go in and  then find I cannot get out. I find it is patterned after Davos in Switzerland, the home of the big economic summits. I have changed over the years but certainly engulfed in the minutiae of [...]

There is the  makai Diamond Head room on the second floor of the Library of Hawaii main branch where I read my way into the Catholic Church 51 years ago. That was the room where they kept the religion books. That category has been moved but it is still a special place for me. There [...]

Well, after a lot of other commitments I return to my books. In the moldy goldy categories: Masscult and Midcult by Dwight Macdonald  republished by New York Review of Books. Norman Mailer respected Macdonald for his depth and contrariness. DM writes about the King James Bible and Hemingway, pop culture in its several colors, and [...]

The Bible in one hand and the newspaper (pc, lap top, ipad) in the other. That was Karl Barth the great Swiss Protestant theologian. Perhaps why a number of priests simply repeat the gospel is that they do not know enough about the world to say what the scriptures mean for us today. I will [...]

Here are books by my chair and bed. These are the kind of book reports you wish that you could submit in school…short. But I have read them! I recommend them for a variety of reasons which you will note. First of all, there is a book I left behind in Idaho with the Benedictine [...]

Here is my Lenten movie, music, book list for 2009… Willa Cather:  Death Comes for the Archbishop. This American classic is essential. Why is that lay people and Willa Cather was the ultimate one…lesbian, Protestant…do the best in writing about priests. J.F. Powers, Garrison Keillor, Georges Bernanos, and Graham Greene are the others. George Eliot [...]