D. A. Hosek

Category: dewey decimal project

  • Dewey Decimal Project: 262.13 PHA Heirs of the Fisherman

    I expected something a bit different than this. There’s an awful lot of cut-and-paste to fill out the pages of the book with the full texts of the last few popes’ wills and while the accounts of the behind-the-scenes of the elections were intriguing, they ultimately were a bit disappointing.  When I was doing a…

  • Dewey Decimal Project: 253.252 AND Priests in Love

    An Australian book, Jane Anderson has a definite opinion on priestly celibacy—viz, she ’s opposed to it as a matter of principle, In this book Anderson is looking at cases of priests who have chosen to remain in the priesthood while simultaneously also entering into romantic relationships. For the most part (or in all cases?…

  • Dewey Decimal Project: 241 CAM 20 Hot Potatoes Christians Are Afraid to Touch

    When my wife was an undergraduate , she and a group of her friends decided to do an event with the lure being Tony Campolo giving a talk. Of course, Campolo was not remotely within their budget so they came up with the idea of asking if Campolo would record a video message that they could…

  • Dewey Decimal Project: 230.0732 The Collar

    An amazing book. It was captivating to read about these not-so-young men on the road to the priesthood. Englert, after a number of attempts, managed to find a Catholic seminary willing to let him spend a year following the students who attended. Where he ended up was a non-traditional seminary, one catering to “second career” would-be…

  • Dewey Decimal Project: 226 BIR The Gospel of the Lord: How the Early Church Wrote the Story of Jesus

    There is a tendency for writing about the Bible to fall into two disjoint camps: there are the literalists who take the naïve view that the text is to be read without concern for its original context or creation, who end up reducing Biblical studies to an absurdity since the literal reading is untenable, not…

  • Dewey Decimal Project: 211 ARM The Case For God

    I’d heard of Karen Armstrong here and there and about this book, so I was curious to read a bit more about what she had to say. Alas, what I found was a lot of squishy theology of the all-religions-are-one variety. Having read God is not One a couple years ago, it’s clear that not only are…

  • Dewey Decimal Project: 202.11 WAU God: The Biography

    It was the name on the spine that caught my attention. I discovered the writing of Waugh’s grandfather, Evelyn Waugh when I was in college after encountering a mention of him in Graham Greene’s Ways of Escape. The elder Waugh, like Greene, was notable as an author who had converted to Catholicism and who had…

  • Dewey Decimal Project: 198.9 KIE Parables of Kierkegaard

    I first learned of the parables of Kierkegaard from a reading a short story a friend asked my to critique. I was intrigued enough that when I spotted this slender volume among the 190s, I picked it up to add to my project. The parables are drawn from throughout Kierkegaard’s writing. In context, they were…

  • Dewey Decimal Project: 181.11 LAI An Introduction to Chinese Philosophy

    I went into this book knowing little more about Chinese philosophy than a handful of “old Confucious say…” jokes. Reading this book expanded my horizons a great deal although my lack of knowledge of Chinese history impeded me somewhat in my understanding.  Overall, one of the more enlightening things was the whole question of whether…