The Tea Party and Catholic Schools

Michael J. Atman

In case you missed them, here are two posts that our readers might find interesting.

The first comes from Thomas Kidd over at Patheos. He offers a brief review of Jill Lepore's The Whites of Their Eyes: The Tea Party's Revolution and the Battle over American History. He writes:

To be fair, there's a lot of interesting history interspersed with these gratuitous fulminations. But Lepore's rant against the Tea Party is at once predictable and ironic. Predictable because Lepore fulfills the stereotypical reaction that one would expect from a liberal (I do not say "far left") Harvard professor, who cannot fathom what could motivate these Tea Partiers other than racism and religious fanaticism. The Whites of Their Eyes is ironic because it perpetuates exactly the sort of angry political feuding that Lepore ostensibly deplores. Because of the book's tone, there's no chance that anyone affiliated with the Tea Party will read this book and be chastened by it. About the only thing this kind of book is guaranteed to do is to make left-wing readers feel good about themselves.

The second comes from Religion Dispatches, where Marian Ronan discusses Timothy Dolan, John Hughes, and Catholic schools in New York.