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Linda Williams Aber has twenty-eight years of publishing experience as an editor, writer, and packager of children's books and series. She is the author of numerous children's books for publishers such as Scholastic, Random House, The Putnam & Grosset Group, St. Martin's Press, and Harcourt Brace. Gioia Fiammenghi has illustrated numerous children's books. Her work has been included on The New York Times' list of 100 Outstanding Children's Books' Illustrators. Her awards include the AIGA and her work has been cited by the Child Study Association in their list of the Best Books of the Year. Gioia lives with her husband in Monte Carlo and has three grown children.
Michael Murphy's book is a singular contribution to the study of Hans Urs von Balthasar's theological enterprise. Murphy skillfully extends von Balthasar's aesthetic and dramatic concerns into a critical dialogue with postmodern assumptions about philosophy, theology, literature and the arts. Murphy argues, in effect, that von Balthasar offers both theologians and literary critics a path for doing theological criticism. Masterfully weaving his argument through the works of Flannery O'Connor, Walker Percy, David Lodge, Denise Levertov, and Lars von Trier, Murphy demonstrates the vital link between theology and culture often missing in today's intellectual discourse. --Mark Bosco, Loyola University Chicago<br> Michael Murphy has advanced the fields of theology and literary criticism with this marvelous look at the relevance of the great theologian, Hans Urs von Balthasar to literary studies. More important, in the connections made between literature and the Catholic imagination, Murphy paves a road towards a twenty-first century critical reading of the religious import of literary fiction. --Alejandro Garcia-Rivera, author of The Community of the Beautiful<br> Michael Murphy's A Theology of Criticism is a remarkable and eye-opening book precisely because it fulfills the bold interdisciplinary promise of its title. It is at one and the same time an illuminating exposition of Balthasar's aesthetic theology and an equally illuminating explication of a number of modern texts-- fiction, poetry, and film-- that substantiates how Balthasar's thought can inform critical reading. Murphy offers a fresh paradigm and exemplum for criticism, and on both the theoretical and practicallevels he writes with intellectual incisiveness and passionate conviction. --Albert Gelpi, Stanford University<br>
