Time's Covenant: The Essays and Sermons of William Clancy

A distinguished editor of Commonweal magazine in the '50s, where he gave definition to the phrase liberal Catholicism, Clancy also had a career as priest-provost of the Pittsburgh Oratory, an academic community modeled on the principles of Cardinal Newman that serviced the city's colleges, among them Carnegie-Mellon. Essays and reviews contributed by Clancy to publications such as the New York Times and Saturday Review are gathered here by Green, a priest who teaches at Stonehill College in Massachusetts, along with 19 sermons that were the product of Clancy's later life. (He died in 1982.) Together they form a kind of literary biography of a graceful and eloquent thinker. Whether reflecting on the meaning of the term liberal Catholic, on the Dreyfuss case, on poetry or the scriptures, Clancy is a bridgebuilder, opening a trove of cultural and spiritual richness that goes beyond parochialism. (February 27)