A short-story writer, novelist, essayist, and critic, J. F. Powers is among the leading satirists in the literary world. His fictional cosmos is for the most part a Roman Catholic rectory, where in miniature all the forces of the secular and the spiritual world converge. With irony, humor, and mockery, yet with compassion, intelligence, and understanding, Powers focuses on those clergy who by virtue of their vows must cope with the imposed ambiguities of serving God and mammon. Without preachment, Powers conveys underlying moral values that seem subordinate in a world mesmerized by money, power, television, crime, and pleasure. He attacks those prelates who become materialists, public-relations pitchmen, and egotists, while he invokes empathy and toleration for those churchmen, both monastic and secular, who attempt to balance the exigencies of the spirit and the world. Despite Powers's adherence to orthodox Roman Catholicism and its prominence in his fiction...