Reviews:
Movies
There Will Be Blood
Paul Anderson's adaptation of Upton Sinclair's 1927 novel Oil! joins an impressive list of Hollywood classics lancing the boil of ambition and greed in the underbelly of the American dream. Like Citizen Kane, The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, The Godfather, Chinatown, and Wall Street, Anderson's brooding and violent epic takes aim at a ruthless and savage winner-take-all ethic buried deep in the American psyche.
Atonement
Older Catholics may recall a story about the standard penance for gossip. "On a blustery day shake out the contents of a feather pillow from a high window. The next day collect every feather scattered across the landscape."
Music
Marry Me
St. Vincent (Beggars Banquet, 2007)
Marry Me, the first album from St. Vincent, takes the listener from one extreme to the other. Most of the music is light and jazzy, but the lyrics are laden with images of violence, war, revenge, and uncertainties.
Books
Before Dallas
Anyone who has been confounded by the church's mishandling of the child sex abuse crisis will benefit from Nicholas Cafardi's detailed account of the church's response prior to the 2002 approval in Dallas of the U.S. bishops' Charter for the Protection of Children and Young People.
As Cafardi, both a civil and canon lawyer, points out, concern about sexual abuse was not born of the 20th century. Collections of canon law have long had provisions on how to handle such offenses by clerics. Why these were not followed, and why other roads were taken instead, serve as the core of the book.
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The Examined Life
The Examined Life
The Examined Life
Margin Notes
Archbishop Elias Chacour of Galilee is working to create his own biblical vision of the Holy Land, in which people of all faiths live together in peace. 
