Recent books of the Faculty | Stories | Notre-Dame review

Quint: a novel, Dionne Irving Bremyer (7.13 lbs). This debut novel is based on the true story of the famous Dionne quintuplets, the first fifths known to have survived infancy. The identical girls were born into a poor farm family in Ontario during the Great Depression, taken from their parents, and turned into a tourist attraction. Irving Bremyer, Associate Professor of English, imagines the lives of girls from different perspectives, including that of their parents, the doctor who helped them come into the world, and a brother who died at birth.

The method of the good life: reasoning through the big questions of happiness, faith and meaning, Meghan Sullivan and Paul Blaschko ’19Ph.D. (Penguin Press). The great questions of life take center stage in this helpful guide from Sullivan, professor of philosophy at Wilsey Family College, and de Blaschko, assistant professor of philosophy. It is based on their popular undergraduate course, God and the Good Life. The case studies presented explore love, religious faith, finance, truth, suffering and more, as well as what great philosophers – ancient and modern – have to say about life’s deepest questions. human.

Old Paper Modernism: Twentieth Century Fiction and the Ruins of Print, Joseph Elkanah Rosenberg
(Oxford University Press). Concerns about the death of the printed page did not start with the advent of the Kindle and other e-readers. Rosenberg, an assistant professor in the Liberal Studies program, examines the recurring images of destroyed and ravaged paper – burnt manuscripts, junk mail, bureaucratic paperwork – in 20th century novels, including the works of Henry James, DH Lawrence, Elizabeth Bowen , Vladimir Nabokov and others. He suggests that some of the experimental techniques found in their stories are in part a reaction to changes in media that were already taking place at the dawn of the century.

Soldiers of God in a Secular World: Catholic Theology and French Politics of the Twentieth Century,
Sarah shorts (Harvard University Press). The Third French Republic proclaimed the separation of Church and State in 1905, but the Catholic Church was not made. French Jesuits and Dominicans, who studied in seminaries in exile, continued to develop the new theology, or “new theology,” in the 1930s and 1940s, played a key role in the modernization of the Church and ultimately inspired many of the changes produced by the Second Vatican Council, writes Shortall, assistant professor of history. In the process, Catholic intellectuals and priests formulated a new public role for their faith in secular times.

Religion and Politics Beyond Culture Wars: New Directions in a Divided America, edited by Darren
Dochuk ’05Ph.D. (Press of the University of Notre-Dame). Much of the recent history of modern American religion and politics assumes an enduring partisan divide. This collection of essays – written by renowned academics and edited by Dochuk, professor of history at Andrew V. Tackes College – encourages readers to look beyond predictable clashes over social issues and examine ways in which the faith fueled 20th century American politics. Examining debates on topics such as labor, immigration, civil rights, marriage equality, and foreign policy, contributors argue that standard and accepted narratives do not tell the full story of religious faith and of politics in the modern era.