For most of my time on-line I’ve been a reviewer of books. I greatly fear that I’m mutating into a critic.

These two jobs distinct and separate. A reviewer’s job is to tell you enough about the book so that you can decide for yourself whether or not you’d like to read it. As a reviewer, I try to talk about what kind of book it is; whether I enjoyed it or not (and if not, why not); and in general, whether it contains an interesting tale, well-told. These are fairly modest goals.

A critic, by contrast, is all about evaluating a book from some other point of view. And I find that when I come to review a book these days, I can’t help pondering the degree to which it is consistent with Catholic teaching. That phrase, “consistent with Catholic teaching,” covers a vast world of things, which I can’t do justice to in this short post; I hope to have some things to say about in the future. At present, I’ll simply say that I’m not talking about whether or not the book has explicitly Catholic themes, or whether or not the characters behave according to Catholic moral teaching; it’s more complicated than that.

And then, of course, if the book does say something explicit about the Catholic Church, I feel like I need to address it.

I can’t seem to help any of this; and I’m not at all sure it’s a bad thing. But after having worn a pretty smooth and comfortable groove in the area of writing book reviews, it’s unsettling. I hope the results will be no less useful.