Film and Book Reviews

One avenue of intimacy with our Lord is seeking a deeper understanding of our own hearts and how we can better offer them to His love—an idea that Tanner Kalina thoroughly adventures through in his new book, All Your Heart, available July 20 from Ascension Press.

When I picked up Batman & Faith: Essays on the Dark Knight and the Soul from Voyage Comics, I expected to appreciate it from afar. I thought it would be an interesting collection for “serious” Batman fans, who know every Robin, every timeline, every villain origin story.

For those seeking a theological story of truth, love, and faith—but aren’t quite ready to sit down with St. Augustine’s Confessions—Thomas Curry’s Miss Sally’s Son (Ignatius Press) is a compelling alternative.

Curry himself describes the novel as a way to reach audiences who might otherwise not be open to reading about the Catholic faith, writing that his “goal in writing has always been evangelization, believing that fiction speaks to a different ear than serious theology.”

“You can’t study the life of a Christian mystic for very long before you find yourself back in the Church,” Jenny duBay recently told Paloma & Fig. She would know, having immersed herself in Catherine’s writings and the landscape of Siena itself to write World Between Worlds, a lush and sprawling novel of the saint’s early life.

When I hear there’s a new The Lord of the Rings movie in the works, I get just a wee bit protective (never mind my long-standing argument that there are no good sequels . . . or at least, very few). Middle-earth is special for so many of us, especially those who grew up tucked away in the pages of J.R.R. Tolkien’s “sub-creation.”