'Searching for Marquette,' by Ruth D. Nelson

I remember the first time I heard Steely Dan’s “Deacon Blues,” a song about winning and losing in life. I was 10 years old, attempting to explain the lyrics to my father. Sitting across from me in the kitchen of our old apartment, his acoustic guitar across his lap, my father respo

I never saw the root of the realIn arboreal flare,Nor witnessed this man walk on water,Nor that one float in air. I sat beneath the bodhi tree;I felt my body itch.Between the true cup and the falseI knew not which was which. My eyes have never blown like fusesSparked black upon a wall,No s

'F. Scott Fitzgerald's Fiction,' by John T. Irwin

When I was small, at our home in Trenton, New Jersey, I would sit on the stairs and listen to my father, the newspaperman, read aloud to my mother, the school teacher, as she knitted. Two books were Charles Reade’s The Cloister and the Hearth, the story of Erasmus before he became the famous m

Robert Bartlett’s book will also be welcome to those who have experienced something of the power of the cult of the saints in their own time and place.