Gracjan Kraszewski

This book will help you understand that, yes, you can study dog poetry, become the Minnesota Twins closer, run for president of the United States, become a Franciscan friar in Albuquerque, put oranges in a circle, teach courses in conflicting political theory at the University of Idaho, attend Mass literally underground in a subterranean cathedral hundreds of feet below the desert floor, play no pads tackle football on Boise State's blue turf, write tracts while sunbathing at the top of Namur's castle in summertime, discuss constitutional originalism while getting a back rub, and fight a lot, I mean tons, tons see: a cornucopia, no, a plethora, nay, an overabundance, of bad, super, super bad guys bent on well...yes, the, yeah, the standard take over the world and rule everyone thing, you know, that, but, wait, but this time: nuclear weapons are not subtexted background chatter but out in the open and this time: you get to travel to Illinois, Italy, and Iceland's Blue Lagoon in one footnote and this time: the main love story isn't some stock photo, twenty something couple in a penny dreadful Saturday afternoon movie you watch with a lukewarm latte on a well-worn couch in Lower Manhattan your spirits lower than the elevation itself. No, here it's a 60-something power couple, she extreme left, he extreme right, they, together, perhaps more explosive than the bombs themselves. This book will help you understand that you can do, or, at least try to do, or, failing that, with one-hundred percent certitude, read about others doing these things. You have free will, do you understand that? Of course, this also means that it is your fault. Don't add to your long list of mistakes by missing this book. For Thermonuclear Mirth is unique on the fiction landscape, Catholic and otherwise, today. In an age where "fiction" invariably means dragons, knights, ladies and endless webs of fantastical fakeries, one will not find a single example of such things in this book. Thermonuclear Mirth is a wholly fictional book of real life in the future, a future as it might become, not as it can never be, with a persistent question of what can be done in response, by applying eternal truths, running from cover to cover. The book is at times sincere, at times absurd, at times extremely absurd; it will make you cry, laugh until you cry, inspire you to learn at least one foreign language, and make you feel guilty, and ashamed, if you cannot do ten pull-ups, jump up and touch 9 feet, and run a respectable mile; it is at times profane, vulgar, and base, but, unlike scores of books for whom those markers are the goal as well, here such things are only present so as to show the horrid reality of sin so as to lead readers to a clearer, and long lasting, appreciation of the narrow path towards the Good, the True, the Beautiful. The "reality of sin;" so too the reality of beer, politics at Thanksgiving dinner, Rottweilers, Lake Zurich, Rhode Island Red Hens, ad infinitum. This because Thermonuclear Mirth is a book about real life; the messiness of it, yes, down to the very bottom of the well; but the hope, rather the surety, of solutions to the messiness and a path to authentic happiness.

This is a story about a coming, slowly creeping, once in a millennium climatological disaster event. Yet the residents of a small Pacific Northwest town, especially their Mayor, seem more concerned with the taking up of a homeless man and his cohort in downtown, a development threatening to ruin their idyllic self-perceptions. Even as the storm readies to deliver a direct hit, many view the homeless men as the true "plague" rather than a dust storm, acid spitting, Tornado funnel-front that has reduced Syracuse and Chicago to utter ruin. Ultimately, it is a story about what it means to love one's neighbor, what it means to sacrifice, what it means to trust in God's providential, often unseen, plans.

The Hippo Lectures is a book of essays that were first given as live audience, public talks. Catholicism being a "both/and" faith, this work is both fiction and non-fiction; speech and story; serious and absurd; broadly maximal and microscopically focused. It's singular glue, however, is the Catholic Faith. All the essays-whether about the environment, beauty, athletics, beer, sex, economics, film, or American politics, to name but a few-are viewed through a Catholic lens. Now nearly past the first quarter of the 21st century, deep into postmodernity, Catholics need books that take societal challenges head on, resisting the temptations to accommodate error, look the other way, or seek answers in the 13th century. Head on, and using postmodern tools and techniques, as we are meant to use all things, for the glory of God. This is that book.

The Hippo Lectures is a book of essays that were first given as live audience, public talks. Catholicism being a "both/and" faith, this work is both fiction and non-fiction; speech and story; serious and absurd; broadly maximal and microscopically focused. It's singular glue, however, is the Catholic Faith. All the essays-whether about the environment, beauty, athletics, beer, sex, economics, film, or American politics, to name but a few-are viewed through a Catholic lens. Now nearly past the first quarter of the 21st century, deep into postmodernity, Catholics need books that take societal challenges head on, resisting the temptations to accommodate error, look the other way, or seek answers in the 13th century. Head on, and using postmodern tools and techniques, as we are meant to use all things, for the glory of God. This is that book.

How did Southern Catholics, under international religious authority and grounding unlike Southern Protestants, act with regard to political commitments in the recently formed Confederacy? How did they balance being both Catholic and Confederate? How is the Southern Catholic Civil War experience similar or dissimilar to the Southern Protestant Civil War experience? What new insights might this experience provide regarding Civil War religious history, the history of Catholicism in America, 19th-century America, and Southern history in general?For the majority of Southern Catholics, religion and politics were not a point of tension. Devout Catholics were also devoted Confederates, including nuns who served as nurses; their deep involvement in the Confederate cause as medics confirms the all-encompassing nature of Catholic involvement in the Confederacy, a fact greatly underplayed by scholars of Civil war religion and American Catholicism. Kraszewski argues against an "Americanization" of Catholics in the South and instead coins the term "Confederatization" to describe the process by which Catholics made themselves virtually indistinguishable from their Protestant neighbors.The religious history of the South has been primarily Protestant. Catholic Confederates simultaneously fills a gap in Civil War religious scholarship and in American Catholic literature by bringing to light the deep impact Catholicism has had on Southern society even in the very heart of the Bible Belt.

How did Southern Catholics, under international religious authority and grounding unlike Southern Protestants, act with regard to political commitments in the recently formed Confederacy? How did they balance being both Catholic and Confederate? How is the Southern Catholic Civil War experience similar or dissimilar to the Southern Protestant Civil War experience? What new insights might this experience provide regarding Civil War religious history, the history of Catholicism in America, 9th-century America, and Southern history in general? For the majority of Southern Catholics, religion and politics were not a point of tension. Devout Catholics were also devoted Confederates, including nuns who served as nurses their deep involvement in the Confederate cause as medics confirms the all-encompassing nature of Catholic involvement in the Confederacy, a fact greatly underplayed by scholars of Civil war religion and American Catholicism. Kraszewski argues against an "Americanization" of Catholics in the South and instead coins the term "Confederatization" to describe the process by which Catholics made themselves virtually indistinguishable from their Protestant neighbors. The religious history of the South has been primarily Protestant. Catholic Confederates simultaneously fills a gap in Civil War religious scholarship and in American Catholic literature by bringing to light the deep impact Catholicism has had on Southern society even in the very heart of the Bible Belt.

THE HOLDOUT is a philosophical novel set in modern-day Mississippi treating religion, sexuality, academic life and academic freedom, sports and sports culture against the backdrop of the quotidian daily malaise (named 'torpor' in the work) afflicting all people. The story is told through the first person viewpoint of Rhett Lawson, an ex-NFL player finishing up graduate school. Rhett is a sincere Catholic although obsessed with women and sex and finds himself often trapped in "the torpor." His two main companions are his friends Brent (an atheist) and David (an Evangelical Protestant). The three have wide-ranging discussions on various topics throughout the narrative. Additionally, issues of race (Rhett is white, his aunt Shelby, a central figure to the story, is black), the nature of contemporary academia, and commentary on life in twenty-first century Mississippi (something largely unplumbed in comparison to the plethora of works that have tackled the Civil War South of the 1860s or the Civil Rights Era South of the 1960s) underpin the story.