NCR Book Club

THE ORIGINS OF WAR: A CATHOLIC PERSPECTIVE
By Matthew A. Shadle
Published by Georgetown University Press, $29.95

Hanging in the Jonah House living room in Baltimore is an icon of Ben Salmon by Bill McNichols. Salmon refused induction into World War I and was sentenced to death, a sentence later commuted to 20 years. He non-cooperated each step of the way and was released after about four years. I look at the icon and remember Salmon’s words: “Either Jesus was a liar or war is never necessary!” Reading The Origins of War, I thought a lot about Salmon.

DEMOCRACY DESPITE ITSELF: WHY A SYSTEM THAT SHOULDN’T WORK AT ALL WORKS SO WELL
By Danny Oppenheimer and Mike Edwards
Published by MIT Press, $24.95

If this book were a cocktail party, it would be an especially bad one. You might encounter a witticism here, a decent, though not hilarious, joke there. In the course of the evening, the partiers become more and more intoxicated and, consequently, the conversation grows less incisive, less memorable and less interesting.

GOD’S RIGHT HAND: HOW JERRY FALWELL MADE GOD A REPUBLICAN AND BAPTIZED THE AMERICAN RIGHT
By Michael Sean Winters
Published by HarperCollins, $28.99

Jerry Falwell: fundamentalist, evangelical, Christian, homophobic, extremist, paradoxical. He was a preacher who transcended lines. Vocal about the moral decline in the United States due to liberal social agendas, by the end of his life Falwell could count Sen. Ted Kennedy and pornographer Larry Flynt as personal friends.

VOTING AND HOLINESS: CATHOLIC PERSPECTIVES ON POLITICAL PARTICIPATION
By Nicholas Cafardi
Published by Paulist Press, $24.95

Though President Barack Obama won the Catholic vote in 2008, 2012 will not be as easy, either for him or for the Catholics who had supported him.

Obama’s health care overhaul and ensuing birth control provisions, his unwillingness to enforce the Defense of Marriage Act, and his refusal to end legal abortion all conflict with church teaching.

Book recounts policy accomplishments of Indiana’s Sen. Lugar

RICHARD G. LUGAR, STATESMAN OF THE SENATE: CRAFTING FOREIGN POLICY FROM CAPITOL HILL
By John T. Shaw
Published by Indiana University Press, $28

This is a tale of two Congresses: one that is stuck in the mud and gets no respect, and one where Republican Sen. Richard Lugar of Indiana has been dedicated to trying to keep American foreign policy on track and the country safer. It’s also a tale of a senator whose belief in bipartisanship sticks out like a sore thumb in a party where they wash out your mouth with soap just for talking to Democrats -- and expect serious penance if you vote with them.

GOD’S JURY: THE INQUISITION AND THE MAKING OF THE MODERN WORLD
By Cullen Murphy
Published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, $27

One Saturday morning a year or so ago, I was in the local supermarket pushing my shopping cart toward the produce section. I passed an elderly man, a man I didn’t know but had seen on a number of occasions in the library of John Carroll University, where I teach. As we passed each other he uttered a single word: “Heretic.” I stopped in my tracks and looked back as he proceeded to the store’s exit. I brushed it aside as a remark of a reactionary Catholic disturbed by my writing on church renewal and reform.

LATINO CATHOLICISM: TRANSFORMATION IN AMERICA’S LARGEST CHURCH
By Timothy Matovina
Published by Princeton University Press, $29.95

The future is in the numbers. Census data and recent surveys project a continued, dramatic growth of the U.S. Latino population, fueled by immigration and higher birth rates than other demographic groups, against a declining population of white Americans of European descent. This trajectory has special implications for the U.S. Catholic church, which is now approaching 40 percent Latino membership. Notably, half of all Catholics under age 25 are Latino. Since 1960, Latino Catholics have accounted for 70 percent of all growth among U.S. Catholics. Without this surge, the U.S. Catholic church, which has also seen a major exodus of Euro-Catholic members, would be posting a decline similar to many mainline Protestant churches.

THE QUEST FOR GOD AND THE GOOD: WORLD PHILOSOPHY AS A LIVING EXPERIENCE
By Diana Lobel
Published by Columbia University Press, $26.50

We don’t often think about the extent to which philosophical frameworks guide both our religious quests and our everyday lives. Who or what is God? How are God and the world related? What is the good? How is our human conception of the good related to the ultimate Good? Do happiness, goodness and religiousness coincide? What is the relationship between the active life (in pursuit of the good) and the contemplative life (reflecting on God)?

David Gentry-Akin, associate professor of theology at St. Mary’s College of California, writing in the Oct. 3 issue of NCR, called Fr. Richard McBrien’s new book, The Church: The Evolution of Catholicism, “breathtaking in its scope and yet manageable in its presentation.”

“The book,” published by HarperOne, the religious books division of HarperCollins, he said, “is not strictly a history of the church, though of course a great deal of history is to be found between its covers. Rather, it’s a focused study of ecclesiology, literally, the study of the church.”

McBrien is a priest of the archdiocese of Hartford, Conn. He is the author of a number of other books, including his best-selling Catholicism, Lives of the Popes, and Lives of the Saints. He is general editor of the one-volume HarperCollins Encyclopedia of Catholicism.

McBrien is past president of the Catholic Theological Society of America and winner of its annual John Courtney Murray Award for "distinguished achievement in Theology."

I spoke with him recently about his book. The interview is divided into four parts.

THE ART OF CONFESSION: RENEWING YOURSELF THROUGH THE PRACTICE OF HONESTY
By Paul Wilkes
Published by Workman Publishing, $18.95

Touching on the many facets of confessing, Paul Wilkes seeks to redefine the subject.

Although he discusses the sacrament of reconciliation, this isn’t a particularly Roman Catholic book or even an especially religious book. Blending history, memoir, psychology, philosophy, theology, sociology and self-help advice, Wilkes offers a kaleidoscopic presentation of confession with, as he says, a small “c.”