God at the Ritz Attraction to Infinity

By Lorenzo Albacete

Book Overview

Lorenzo Albacete, a close friend of Pope John Paul II, physicist, and New York Times columnist, shows that religion has a place amid conversations on science and contemporary culture. With humor and honesty, Albacete answers questions about life and death, good and evil, science and religion, religion and politics, and other issues.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0824524721
• ISBN13: 9780824524722
• Release Date: September 2007
• Publisher: Crossroad Publishing
• Length: 208 Pages
• Weight: 0.58 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.6" x 5.5" x 8.2"

Customer Reviews

If God went to cocktail parties...

While advising on a film about John Paul II, the eccentrically brilliant Monsignor Albacete stayed at the Ritz in Hollywood and was accosted by all kinds of people who asked, on location and at poolside and everywhere else, incisive questions about God, religion, evil, hope, and other matters that really matter. This little book joins their questions and his responses in a winsome apologetic that might be categorized as pre-evangelization. However categorized, it is thinking of a high order set forth with literary grace and humor, and all in the service of understanding the irrepressible human aspiration toward the infinite. This is a First THings review.

About the essence of life itself, its meaning, God's plan

God At The Ritz: Attraction To Infinity is the candid discourse by Lorenzo Albacete (a Catholic priest and physicist with a degree in Space Science and Applied Physics), about the essence of life itself, its meaning, God's plan, and a great deal more. From surveying the balance between science and faith; to addressing the eternal questioning of why such suffering and horror exist in God's world; to the "big three" contemporary issues of sex, money, and politics; God At The Ritz is a refreshing, insightful, articulate, "reader friendly", and highly recommended attempt to make sense of the great mysteries of life, and to acknowledge that there are some concepts that can only be understood by God himself.

Attraction to Infinity--through the finite

Monsignor Lorenzo Albacete has written a serious and humorous book about the human longing, desire, and attraction for the infinite, the eternal, the mysterious "beyond." Albacete is an intellectual, and his brief critiques of other thinkers testify to a brilliant mind, but his illustrations and vignettes always spring from life: a very earthy life, his life. And so the relationship between reason and human experience forms the thread that ties this book together. That thread is a kind of judgement, but his judgement is so humble, so full of humanity and understanding, because it flows not from an abstract theory, but from a life fully lived, from a mind and a man engaged with human reality in his search for the meaning of that reality, for what lies beyond it and ultimately constitutes it. Here is a book capable of speaking to any man of any time, brimming with the humanity and generosity of its author.

Albacete is a modern day Pascal!

Msgr. Albacete is a modern day Pascal, and this is his Pensees'. Albacete writes a column for the NY Times Magazine, and is respected by the cultural elites (the recent PBS special on "Faith and 9-11" ended with his comments). Yet, he is a Catholoic priest completely committed to the teachings of the Catholic Church, as well as a personal friend of Pope John Paul II. How so? Read this book and find out. Where Pascal shattered the smug rationalism of his day, now Albacete performs aikido on modernism and post-modernism, reconciling all that's true and good in them with genuine faith, while exposing modernity's fallacies -- its hidden ideologies, utopias, and deceptions that keep us from fulfilling our genuine desires, especially our inborn longing to know the meaning of life and the universe. While written for seekers of all kinds, this book makes it possible, for the first time since Darwin, Marx, Nietzsche and Freud (and Seinfeld), to be a really intellectually satisfied believer. If you think you've given faith every chance, and it's always come up short, this is the book for you.

Funny funny funny, and profound

This is a difficult book to summarize in a few words. The basic idea is that religion, true religion, starts with the mystery of God. If the mystery is grasped by humans, it's not the true mystery, and believing that we "possess" the mystery leads to deformations of belief -- fundamentalism, war, and the like. On the other hand, if we ignore the mystery altogether, we simply fail to be fully human and miss out on an important part of ourselves.What's interesting about Albacete's book is that he isn't setting out an airtight argument for belief in God, respect for the Catholic Church, and so forth. He's presenting a vision, hoping to help readers get a glimpse of the mysterious and why it matters to people of faith. And he does so with a good deal of humor. He loves Monty Python, New Yorker cartoons, and other silly elements from pop culture, and he knows how to tell a good story.This book may not be to everyone's taste -- for one thing, it may be a little too irreverent at times for some uptight readers. But I'm buying this book as a Christmas gift for religious friends and friends who like fun books on serious topics.