Robert R. Reilly Daniel C. Mattson, Why I Don't Call Myself Gay: How I Reclaimed My Sexual Reality and Found Peace (Ignatius Press) Why would someone with homosexual inclinations not call himself "gay"? After all, our popular culture practically screams for him to do so. The Supreme Court even offers to bless his "union" with another [...]
Ronald J. Rychlak The Persecution and Genocide of Christians in the Middle East: Prevention, Prohibition,& Prosecution (Angelica Press, 2017) "I knew they were persecuting Westerners," she said. "I just didn’t know they were persecuting Christians." The "she" is a very well educated and informed woman who had just read the first chapter of a new book, [...]
Archbishop Charles J. Chaput, Strangers in a Strange Land (Henry Holt, 2017) "Simply put, America can't be the way it once was." (Original italic.) This is not so much a lament as it is a reality check: Catholics upset with the culture can work to change it, but they cannot expect a return to more placid [...]
Ronald J. Rychlak Robin Harris, Stepinac: His Life and Times (Gracewing Publishing, 2016) Those who study churchmen of the WWII era know that Cardinal Aloysius Stepinac, Archbishop of Zagreb during WWII, is controversial. Following the war, communist authorities charged and convicted him of collaboration with the Nazi-like Ustashe party. Those false charges have followed Stepinac, even [...]
Deal W. Hudson Ann McElhinney and Phelim McAleer, Gosnell: The Untold Story of America's Most Prolific Serial Killer (Regnery Publishing, 2017) This is the most difficult book I've ever read, which has nothing to do with how it's written, organized, or argued. The difficulty arises, in part, from the ease of reading the prose of Ann [...]
Rick Hinshaw Melissa Ohden, You Carried Me: A Daughter's Memoir (Walden, NY: Plough Publishing House, 2017) Melissa Ohden's story begins with an attempt to kill her in her mother's womb. That is what brought her to Washington in September 2015 to testify before the Judiciary Committee of the U.S. House of Representatives. She spoke along with [...]
William Doino Jr. Rodney Stark, Bearing False Witness: Debunking Centuries of Anti-Catholic History (Templeton Press, 2016) In the world of religious scholarship, few men are as respected as Rodney Stark. He is a sociologist by training, and now co-director of Baylor University's Institute for Studies of Religion. Among his best-known works are The Rise of Christianity: [...]
Russell Shaw Russell Shaw, Catholics in America (Ignatius Press, 2016) Who says Catholics don't have a presence in today's American politics to match the presence they once had? It all depends on which Catholics—and what version of Catholicism—you have in mind. As their vice-presidential candidate for 2016 the Democrats offered us Tim Kaine, a Catholic senator [...]
Rick Hinshaw Raymond Arroyo, Mother Angelica: Her Grand Silence: The Last Years and Living Legacy (New York: Image, 2016) In his previous biography on Mother Angelica, Raymond Arroyo brought us into personal contact with her extraordinary life. He took us through not only her remarkable accomplishments, but the seemingly insurmountable challenges she had to overcome in [...]
Thomas C. Reeves In 2003, Pope John Paul II beatified world-famous Mother Teresa. On September 4, she will be canonized. Bill Donohue, long-time president of the Catholic League, examined the extensive literature on the topic and discovered nothing that directly supported Mother Teresa's critics. Donohue, as always, is careful with his research (the footnoting is extensive), [...]