Dana Greene

Poet Anne Porter wrote with an incarnational imagination, she knew both suffering and love, the two wellsprings that bring one to awe and mystery, and prompt reaching out in compassion. 

Book review: Two books on St. Mary of Egypt provide access to a mysterious figure, ask questions about the power of legend, and establish desire and conversion as key aspects of the Christian tradition of holiness.

Book review: Learning from the sons and daughters of Sts. Benedict and Scholastica, Patrick Henry sees a Benedictine world of many options that offer a fresh understanding of how to live as a Christian in the world.

Book Review: Ron Rolheiser is one of America's most important spiritual writers. He is clear that spirituality must be based on theology lest it become unhealthy.

Book review: The author's intent is not to collapse Islam into Christianity or vice versa, but rather to appreciate that Muslims too encounter God, and like Christians their naming is a way to enter into the nameless origin of all.

Book review: NCR readers who might be eager to know how House Speaker Nancy Pelosi's faith — Pelosi is a committed Catholic — and actions intersect, will be disappointed, but Molly Ball's Pelosi confirms the speaker's contribution to American history.

Book review: For the many who consider this Southern Catholic one of the best fiction writers of 20th-century America, Good Things Out of Nazareth and Andalusian Hours commemorate her in very different ways.

Review: In this extended reflection on the much-beloved poet's work, Charles Murphy charts the sacramental qualities of Dickinson's imagination and her rebellion against sin-haunted Calvinism.

Book review: She started writing it 23 years after leaving, and it took 15 years to complete. As a 27-year-old recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, Forché traveled to El Salvador in 1978, an unlikely candidate to tell this gripping story of atrocity.

Book Review: The Universal Christ: How a Forgotten Reality Can Change Everything We See, Hope For, and Believe is the summation of the lifetime work of Richard Rohr, the result of his 75 years of experience and reflection.

Book review: Benedictine Sr. Joan Chittister is one of the most influential voices in American Catholicism. Her latest book, "The Time Is Now," is an oratorical and inspirational book meant to call all those who claim to be Christian.

Augustinian Fr. Martin Laird's message is summarized in the book's subtitle: The practice of contemplation with all of its challenges can lead to transformation and liberation.

Book review: In his 10th book, Quaker teacher and spiritual mentor Parker Palmer, 79, offers readers a backward view of his life and what he has learned. The book is Palmer's meditation on the meaning of his life, past, present and future.

For more than 35 years, Dolores Leckey lectured and wrote on lay spirituality, mining the treasures of the Catholic tradition and revitalizing them for the contemporary world. She crafted her work to be accessible and drew on her own sources of encouragement — Scripture, literature, poetry, theology and personal experience. 

Jill Ker Conway, historian and memoirist who served as Smith College's first woman president, created an environment in academia in which women could flourish and find their own vocations.

Book Review: As a universal phenomenon, accessible to young and old, gratefulness connects each person to all living things and helps one to live in the present and face life with trust and joy. For Benedictine Br. David Steindl-Rast, gratefulness is a prelude to happiness, not vice versa. 

Witnesses. Forbearers. Pioneers. We forget them at our peril. We tend to remember those who fit neatly into some category, those who can be simply classified. Women of insight and originality are not so easily accommodated.

Book Review: The importance of this biography is not only that it details the familiar life of Dorothy Day, but it raises universal questions that are not easily answered.