Wherever they went the Irish brought with them their books, many unseen in Europe for centuries and tied to their waists as signs of triumph, just as….

If there are no books. There is no civilization..

How real is history? Is it just an enormous soup so full of disparate ingredients that it is uncharacterizable?.

In becoming an Irishman, Patrick wedded his world to theirs, his faith to their life…Patrick found a way of swimming down to the depths of the Irish ….

Is is seldom possible to say of the medievals that they *always* did one thing and *never* another; they were marvelously inconsistent..

The Irish innovation was to make all confession a completely private affair between penitent and priest - and to make it as repeatable as necessary. ….

Throughout the world, half of all children go to bed hungry each night and one in seven of God's children is facing starvation. Before such statistic….

We normally think of history as one catastrophe after another, war followed by war, outrage by outrage - almost as if history were nothing more than ….

The Irish believed that gods, druids, poets, and others in touch with the magical world could be literal shape-shifters.

(The festival) was awfully impersonal and abstract and there was something really gloomy about it. That's when I first started thinking about the typ….

We can hardly get up in the morning or cross the street without being Jewish. We dream Jewish dreams and hope Jewish hopes. Most of our best words, i….

One of my rigid goals is to keep each book under 300 pages because I think so much nonfiction is literally weighty that people don't get through thes….

The Jews started it all-and by 'it' I mean so many of the things we care about, the underlying values that make all of us, Jew and Gentile, believer ….

The phrase the violent bear it away fascinated the 20th century Irish-American storyteller Flannery O'Connor, who used it as the title of one of her ….

Throughout our world the cry of the poor so often goes unheard. The prophets harangued Israel and Judah unceasingly about the powerless and marginali….