Essays

I make it a year and four months since Cardinal Jorge Mario Bergoglio was elected pope. In the light of this I was interested to read that he (Pope Francis as he became) had his first interview with a female journalist just three weeks ago.

Whatever happened to that steely British resolve, that famous Churchillian stiff upper lip?  When did the English become as whiny as we Americans?

The summer of 1961 was one of my favorites: Mickey Mantle and Roger Maris were hitting home runs, Whitey Ford was winning games, and "Who Put the Bomp" was a big hit on my transistor radio.

This is an Excerpt from my new book 

Ah for every one step forward two steps backward.

Let's be honest. Sure some smart young people who "come to Christ" are deeply sincere.

Very recently I heard a young Israeli called Yehuda Shaul being interviewed on Radio Ulster.

A reader has asked me to comment on the poem in Robert Hass’s book titled “Human Wishes” that I discuss in  my essay Robert Hass, poet: Meaning and Form and Pleasure.

I didn't know who Gerry Goffin was when I was in junior high school, and high school, in the '60s. I listened to AM radio constantly on my new transistor radio, and I knew all the songs on KEWB's weekly Top 20 - so well that sometimes I even called in and won Name It and Claim It.

I'd been writing novels and literary nonfiction for twenty years before I dared to write a 

The reconciliation of science and religion is one of the most compelling tasks confronting religious believers today. For we are truly faced with a pair of hostile, warring camps.

In 1923, T.S. Eliot wrote that in Ulysses, James Joyce had "arrived at a very singular and perhaps unique literary distinction: the distinction of having, not in a negative but a very positive sense, no style at all. I mean that every sentence Mr.

MELBOURNE – In New York last month, Christie’s sold $745 million worth of postwar and contemporary art, the highest total that it has ever reached in a single auction.

The Isla Vista mass murder was a preventable tragedy. It was the destruction of innocent life without need or reason. It is proof, as if more proof were needed, that we are past the time to break the nexus between guns, murder, and mental illness.

History is the story of the struggle of the psychologically normal majority of humanity to free ourselves from the tyranny of a psychologically disordered minority who are marked by their innate propensity for violence and greed.

Part I – Watershed Moments

While we all rightly celebrate the protections afforded free speech by the First Amendment and are thankful, as President Obama said recently at the annual White House Correspondents Dinner, "We really are lucky to live in a country where reporters get to give a head of state a hard time on a da