Sex is good because God created it to be so. Anyone who has ever wondered about the reasoning behind Catholic sexual doctrine (including Catholics!) should read this excellent book.
Good News About Sex and Marriage: Answers to Your Honest Questions About Catholic Teaching
by Christopher West
Conspiracy Theory Grips French: Sept. 11 as Right-Wing U.S. Plot
By ALAN RIDING
Even before the fires were extinguished at the World Trade
Center and the Pentagon, conspiracy theories began flooding the Internet. A
few quickly spilled out of Web sites and were widely circulated by e-mail
before fading into oblivion. One, however, has taken on a life of its own in
France. It was turned into a book that has become the publishing sensation
of the spring.In the book, “L’Effroyable Imposture,” or “The Horrifying Fraud,” Thierry
Meyssan challenges the entire official version of the Sept. 11 attacks.
A Liberal Slant to the News? by Nat Hentoff
In my experience, the two groups most acutely sensitive to criticism are cops and journalists. During the Giuliani years, fear of retribution was so great that some New Yorkers were hesitant to ask a cop for his or her badge number.
As for journalists, Bernard Goldberg’s book Bias: A CBS Insider Exposes How the Media Distort the News (Regnery) has been attacked by, among others, Tom Shales (The Washington Post), Michael Kinsley (Slate), Tom Goldstein (outgoing dean, Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism), and Eric Alterman (The Nation), as if Goldberg were a shabby turncoat and an incompetent journalist besides.
Moreover, one of Goldberg’s former colleagues at CBS News, Eric Engberg, has actually accused Goldberg of having committed “an act of treason.” And Eric Alterman has signed to write a book proving there is no liberal bias in the media.
Is Organized Religion the Enemy?
by Orson Scott Card
For about a year, people have been telling me that the Next Big Thing after Harry Potter was Philip Pullman’s “His Dark Materials,” a young-adult fantasy trilogy consisting of “The Golden Compass,” “The Subtle Knife,” and “The Amber Spyglass.”
Now, this is definitely not a book review column, but I must say right up front that everything everyone says in praise of these books is true. Well, almost everything — it’s not perfect, and not as good as the Harry Potter stories, in part because neither the trilogy nor any individual volume ever achieves a sense of wholeness, and the characters are not deep or even, ultimately, very interesting.
Still, it’s a rip-roaring adventure and it’s well told and I wish I could recommend it to you.
I can’t.