Books
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—You’re not a believer, are you? Haines asked. I mean, a believer in the narrow sense of the word. Creation from nothing and miracles and a personal God. —There’s only one sense of the word, it seems to me, Stephen said. —Joyce, Ulysses
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Sunday Night Journal — June 5, 2011 Ingmar Bergman: Interviews, edited by Raphael Shargel. University Press of Mississippi, 2007. It wasn’t until I started to write this review that I looked at the publication data of the book. Why was it published by the University Press of Mississippi instead of some bigger and more well-known…
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More precisely, two reviews of books about Reformation England. I haven’t read either of the books, but the reviews are interesting in themselves. First, Craig Burrell on Eamon Duffy’s Fires of Faith, a study of the brief and tragic (from several points of view) reign of Mary Tudor. Like, I suppose, most Protestants (or at least…
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Sunday Night Journal — May 15, 2011 Art and Fear, by David Bayles and Ted Orland. Originally published by Capra Press, 1994; current edition Image Continuum, 2010. * One thing that annoys me about my writing is that it’s so self-centered. It’s not just that I write about myself a lot, it’s also that even…
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This 1966 adaptation of Ross Macdonald's The Moving Target is worth seeing if you like detective stories. But Macdonald fans may, or rather should, find it disappointing. The plot is adapted in a reasonable way, but the portrayal of Macdonald's detective, Lew Archer, is badly flawed. He's played by Paul Newman, who insisted on renaming the…
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Sunday Night Journal — May 8, 2011 I was out of town this weekend and didn't get back in time to do any writing, so I am revisiting a couple of old SNJs which had not yet been moved from my original site to this one. I was thinking about Perelandra the other day after reading…
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I've been meaning to mention this. My wife and I finished it up (it's a 4-dvd set) last weekend, and I recommend it enthusiastically. I can simply repeat what I said a couple of years ago about the BBC's Bleak House, except that in this case I haven't read the book at all, but my…
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Writing about Fr. Samir's book on Islam sent me back to Belloc's The Great Heresies for another look at his view of Islam, in the chapter called "The Great and Enduring Heresy of Mohammed." I have to say right off that I don't think "heresy" is a good description for Islam, which seems to me a…
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Sunday Night Journal — March 27, 2011 If you want a single book that will serve as both an introduction to Islam and a careful consideration of its relationship, past and present, to Christianity, I doubt you could do better than this one. The author is an Arab Christian with many years of direct experience…
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Sunday Night Journal — March 13, 2011 This book has been highly recommended to me by more than one person whose opinion I respect. The title and subtitle certainly make it sound like my sort of thing. And I’ve been convinced from an early age (when I first read Keats’s “Ode On a Grecian Urn”)…
Light On Dark Water 