Jonathan Wright, Author at Catholic Herald

Jonathan Wright

The inner hell of the Reformation’s ringleader

March 30, 2017

Martin Luther: Catholic Dissident by Peter Stanford, Hodder, £20 On page 90 of Peter Stanford’s compelling new book we find Martin Luther in a gloomy mood. “What hell may be in that last day, I am not altogether sure,” Luther admits. “I do not believe it is a special place where damned souls now exist

A crime writer on religious mysteries

March 23, 2017

Speaking of Faith edited by John Miller, Canterbury, £20 With hopes of boosting the coffers of the Winchester Cathedral Appeal, various luminaries were invited to discuss faith, public life and a host of contemporary topics in a series of talks. The politicians were polished, with Douglas Hurd musing on the long, sometimes turbulent relationship between

A millennium of converting bigwigs

March 16, 2017

Missionary Monks by Edward Smither, Cascade Books, £20 It’s easy to presuppose a sharp division between globe-trotting missionaries and cloistered, contemplative monks. If we look at the millennium between 500 and 1500, however, assumptions are challenged. As Smither puts it, “If we don’t have monks in this period, then we really have little to talk

The pagan roots of Christian icons

March 02, 2017

The Dawn of Christian Art in Panel Paintings and Icons by Thomas F Mathews with Norman E Muller, Getty, £32.50 Thomas Mathews, assisted here by Norman Muller, is not bashful when it comes to challenging scholarly assumptions. We’re often told that religious icons came to dominate Christian art only during the 6th and 7th centuries.

Good intentions amid the greed and murder

February 23, 2017

Continental Ambitions by Kevin Starr, Ignatius Press, £28 A modern, satisfactory survey of Catholicism in colonial North America has long been a desideratum. Why none has appeared is something of a mystery. Wonderful studies of particular aspects of the story are plentiful, but it has proven surprisingly difficult to pull everything together. Thankfully, Kevin Starr

The Holy Terror from Baltimore

February 16, 2017

Damning Words: the Life and Religious Times of HL Mencken by DG Hart, Eerdmans, £18.99 Henry Louis Mencken worked hard to poke fun at religion. The best gags came when Mencken was in epigrammatic mood. “The Christian,” he wrote, was “one who is willing to serve three Gods, but draws the line at one wife.”

When Coleridge took on the Enlightenment

February 09, 2017

Mariner by Malcolm Guite, Hodder, £25 For Malcolm Guite, Coleridge’s The Rime of the Ancient Mariner is a “unique and always generative visionary work”. It’s easy to be deceived by the antique balladic style, the medieval setting or the spooky Gothic imagery, and to forget just how revolutionary the poem was. Guite sees it as

An exciting new look at the Old Testament

January 26, 2017

Companion to the Old Testament Edited by Hywel Clifford, SCM Press, £21 As the editor concedes, any introduction to the Old Testament joins “a long list of literature”. With the shelves already groaning, something fresh is required, and Clifford and his team have certainly delivered. The volume combines basic explanations of the texts, surveys of

Rumours, leaks and dodgy dossiers

January 19, 2017

When did the word “dossier” become so sinister? If you’re eager to ratchet up the tension or create a sense of skulduggery then the other options simply won’t suffice. When, for instance, you are concocting outlandish theories about why Benedict XVI resigned, there’s a lack of drama in talking about cardinals producing a “file” after

Why Martin Luther’s anti-Semitism matters

January 12, 2017

Luther’s Jews by Thomas Kaufmann, OUP, £18.99 Martin Luther’s venomous writings against the Jewish people were part of what Thomas Kaufmann describes as “a specifically pre-modern anti-Semitism”. This was an era during which absurd rumours about Jews ritually murdering Christian children were commonplace, and in which Jews were vilified as Christ-killing contaminants who deserved to

Thomas Merton’s cheerful radicalism

January 05, 2017

The Root of War is Fear by Jim Forest, Orbis, £17.99 As a Trappist, Thomas Merton “belonged to a religious order with a tradition of silent withdrawal and near disappearance from the world”. But this, as Jim Forest reminds us, hardly prevented Merton from engaging in some of his era’s most divisive social and political

The pantomime that turned into a war

December 15, 2016

Blood and Sand by Alex von Tunzelmann, Simon and Schuster, £25 The Suez Crisis, writes Alex von Tunzelmann, “could have been neatly resolved through diplomacy … saving everyone a lot of trouble”. Unfortunately, Britain, France and Israel did not want a neat solution. They hoped to rid themselves of Gamal Abdel Nasser so they embarked

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