D. A. Hosek

Just another writer

  • Dewey Decimal Project 291.9 ZEI Cults

    There are a few places where the Dewey Decimal System betrays its Victorian origins. The 200s are one of these. 220–289 are dedicated to Christianity and the Bible. All other religions are given 290–299. So faced with the full panoply of world religions outside of Christianity, I ended up choosing this slender book on cults aimed…

  • Beautiful sentences: David Bezmogis

    Though he did not want to desecrate his grief, Alec nonetheless said, I just buried my father, I’d like to come up. David Bezmogis, The Free World.

  • Dewey Decimal Project: 282.092 MAN Vows: The Story of a Priest, a Nun, and their Son

    All it really took to hook me on the book was the title. A priest and a nun get married and have kids? Right up my alley. Where the big surprise came in (and perhaps it shouldn’t have been a surprise), was the fact that the Boston priest sexual abuse scandal came into play in…

  • Beautiful sentences: Terese Svoboda

    At least we have our own cell to settle in. At least the baby doesn’t die of the shot the way he could have, with all the cell fleas and a flesh wound and no mother. He is used to Sharon more anyway is what I suppose, what with the mother no doubt seeping milk…

  • Beautiful Sentences: Lillian S. Robinson

    But ours is a movement that is only half certain where it is marching, and poetry is more often relegated to the “cultural events,” the entertainment segment of feminist conferences, rallies, and meetings, the thing we drop into when the real political work is over. It needs to be more than that, and I am…

  • Salinger Revisited: Pretty Mouth and Green my Eyes

    This is perhaps the oddest story in the collection. The other stories in the collection tend to follow a certain pattern but this one does not. We have a somewhat mysterious scenario with a man with a young woman apparently in his apartment for a romantic adventure which is interrupted by a phone call from…

  • Dewey Decimal Project: 270.1 DAM When the Church Was Young

    After reading, The Gospel of the Lord, I was really curious to read more of the church fathers and eagerly awaited my arrival at this part of the Dewey Decimal system. Of course, dealing with the vagaries of selecting books from the local public library, my choices aren’t always as broad as I would like,…

  • 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?…