Tom Deignan is an author and journalist who writes about religion for National Catholic Reporter, Commonweal magazine, and elsewhere. He teaches at CUNY and is working on a book about religion in the 1920s.
Julian Fellowes’s drama, now in its fourth season on HBO, continues to document the ambitions and expectations at the heart of the American Dream.
By TOM DEIGNAN
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Halloween’s screen villains have a religious history, as ‘Body and Blood’ shows by tracing the Catholic roots of American horror from 19th-century fiction to ‘Psycho’ and ‘The Exorcist.’
By TOM DEIGNAN
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Your enjoyment of FX’s quirky crime drama depends on your tolerance for its star’s ink-stained, hipster-beatnik-radical ‘truthstorian’ act.
By TOM DEIGNAN
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Kelly Lytle Hernández’s study of immigration in America is timely and well-researched but reductive.
By TOM DEIGNAN
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How many origin stories do we really want painstakingly explaining why terrifyingly evil characters become hurt people who hurt people?
By TOM DEIGNAN
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John Kennedy Toole’s beloved New Orleans farce has found a vivid new visual form, courtesy of Albert Monteys’s exuberant illustrations.
By TOM DEIGNAN
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A Catholic TV star in life finds beatification and a YouTube audience in death.
By TOM DEIGNAN
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Two new episodes of ‘New York: A Documentary Film’ offer an engaging and efficient summary of the city’s recent eventful history.
By TOM DEIGNAN
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Jonathan Kaufman evaluates whether the 1980s inaugurated a glorious national renewal or a ‘greed is good’ culture that ended in collapse.
By TOM DEIGNAN
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The Vice President appears to enjoy the Netflix rom-com for the way it dramatizes the costs and benefits of boundless freedom of choice.
By TOM DEIGNAN
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A new book revisits a downtown New York tragedy, whose issues persist in the present.
By TOM DEIGNAN
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George Sosnak’s baseball portraits are so intricate that the Westmoreland Museum of American Art provides magnifying glasses so visitors can appreciate their extraordinary detail.
By TOM DEIGNAN
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