Those greedy popes, gluttons, hypocrites and eternally damned lovers in Dante Alighieri’s 14th century poem, The Divine Comedy, wherein Dante receives guided tours through Hell, Purgatory and Heaven: they’re meaningless to us today, right? Not so fast, says poet Angela Alaimo O’Donnell in Dear Dante: Poems, the human condition is …

People who practice a poetic religion ought to produce great poetry. Catholicism is rich in the elements that make for good poems: rhythmic language (litanies), imagery (icons) and an incarnational ethos (in which the Word becomes flesh and the world itself is charged with God’s grandeur). In 1917, poet Joyce …

Mike Aquilina has distinguished himself as the foremost communicator of early Church history to a general audience. His forte is sifting through a pile of sources, finding valuable nuggets that will capture and keep the attention of a typical reader and presenting that material in an appealing, winsome fashion. In …

Each week, as we pray the Nicene Creed together at Sunday Mass, we declare our belief in the one God who made all things—visible and invisible. In the human person, the visible body and the invisible soul are intrinsically linked. What is good for one is good for the other …

Haley Stewart has put together an invaluable book of essays that every Catholic and serious reader ought to own. Its essays reacquaint us with the life and work of Catholic novelists who ought never be forgotten and whose achievements seem even more unusual and precious now than when they lived. …

The first woman writer to make a living by her own pen, Christine de Pizan published The Book of the City of Ladies in 1405. A devout Catholic widow and mother of three young children, she wrote under the generous patronage of both the crown and nobility of the French …

At the conclusion of a career serving the Church, Francis X. Maier could have written a memoir of his journey from script writer to editor of the National Catholic Register and then to serving Archbishop Charles Chaput in Denver and Philadelphia. Instead, he conducted detailed interviews with bishops, lay faithful, …

Dale Ahlquist is the greatest living expert on the life and literary legacy of G.K. Chesterton and both the longtime President of the Society of Gilbert Keith Chesterton and founder of the Chesterton Schools Network. Thus, it was perfectly appropriate for Word on Fire to select Ahlquist to guide readers …

Amid a sea of self-help books, one has emerged where the Christian parent can find solace, encouragement and great advice. Whereas many texts help the faithful discern priesthood, marriage, consecration or other spiritual life as laity, few focus specifically on Christian parenting. Parenting: The Complex and Beautiful Vocation of Raising …

Popcorn with the Pope: A Guide to the Vatican Film List provides exactly what the subtitle suggests: an eclectic collection of movies created in March of 1995 by Pope St. John Paul II. A great lover of the arts, in explaining his rationale for the list, he wrote: Since the …