“I like punctuality, it’s a virtue I have learned to appreciate,” Pope Francis writes in the fifth chapter of his autobiography, to be published on Tuesday in 18 languages, adding that he considers it “a sign of good manners and respect, to arrive promptly.” Unfortunately, as a newborn, Francis writes, he arrived a week late, […]

The Vatican has approved new guidelines for Italy that say that an applicant for the seminary cannot be rejected simply because he is gay, as long as he remains celibate. The guidelines say that seminary directors should consider sexual orientation as only one aspect of a candidate’s personality. They do not change the Roman Catholic […]

In the trilogy’s second book, “Small World” (1984), Morris Zapp, a slick theoretician delivering a lecture at a conference, uses the striptease style supposedly popular in the all-nude go-go bars of Berkeley, Calif., as a metaphor for what continental theory has uncovered about language: “This is not striptease, it is all strip and no tease, […]