Jason Berry

Articles

New Orleans

Aaron Neville on singing, crashing and St. Jude

Tell It Like It Is: My Story Aaron Neville 288 pages; Published by Hachette Books $29.00 On a balmy afternoon in 1979, I interviewed New Orleans rhythm-and-blues singer Aaron Neville under his favored tree by the Audubon Park lagoon. He…
The Church

Graham Greene’s Soul

By Jason Berry | Commonweal Magazine Across a span of fifty years, Michael Mewshaw has published twenty-two books, evenly divided between novels and nonfiction, with a lot of journalism fueling the mix. An American writer who has lived for long stretches…
New Orleans

Moon Landrieu was a visionary Catholic mayor who reshaped New Orleans

by Jason Berry, National Catholic Reporter NEW ORLEANS — When Moon Landrieu became mayor in 1970, New Orleans was a slumbering backwater. The old-pedigree establishment synonymous with elite Carnival balls enjoyed a segregated status quo. The population of about 593,000 had…
New Orleans

An Ex-Cop and a Preacher Wrestle With America’s Gun Violence

By Jason Berry, The Daily Beast America has 50 million more guns than its 344.4 million people—a figure stratospherically beyond that of any other country. The cult of mass murders has jolted our moorings as a country, if not the very idea…
New Orleans

How Henry Butler’s Piano Rekindled a Fiery NOLA Tradition

By Jason Berry, The Daily Beast When the New Orleans pianist Henry Butler reached New York in 2009, the strapping dude with sunglasses and a felt hat looked way younger than 61. Riding a wave of concerts and recordings, Butler, in fact,…
The Church

Historian’s new book highlights Pius XII’s moral failures

By Jason Berry,  National Catholic Reporter Pope Pius XII was a slender, ascetic pope who dined alone most nights in the Apostolic Palace, attended by nuns, a pet canary at hand; he then spent hours writing statements and speeches during…
The South

Go South to Find the Deepest Blues in the Reddest States

By Jason Berry, The Daily Beast As the 1970s dawned, Mobile-bred Albert Murray, a longtime resident of Harlem, made a trip down South, meeting with writers and old acquaintances, gauging the state of race relations and literature since the civil rights…
Poetry

Poet Laureate Joy Harjo Rewrites America’s Myths

By Jason Berry, The Daily Beast I started a Joy Harjo reading jag the summer before last in Santa Fe, New Mexico, at op. cit., a magical store in whose forest of books, new and older, I picked up her…
New Orleans

George Washington Cable: a statue we need

By Jason Berry | The New Orleans Advocate As the city council embraces Take ‘Em Down NOLA’s call for changing the names of streets and spaces linked to slaveholders and White supremacy, a larger question looms: how do we reimagine…
New Orleans

Trump Copies New Orleans’ Tragic 1853 Yellow Fever Playbook

By Jason Berry | The Daily Beast TOO LITTLE TOO LATE More than 4,000 New Orleanians died in one month, largely because selfish, ignorant city leaders ignored basic sanitation measures that might have saved hundreds of lives. After two weeks…
New Orleans

New Orleans Faces Another Disaster

By Jason Berry | Slate Politics As massive coronavirus shutdowns took hold in California and New York, down in Louisiana this past Sunday Gov. John Bel Edwards announced that the state had the world’s fastest growth rate of confirmed cases…
New Orleans

Survival ethos marks New Orleans, now an epicenter of COVID-19

By Jason Berry | Published on National Catholic Reporter (https://www.ncronline.org) In March, the azaleas blossom like tiny valentines on the grassy St. Charles Avenue median where streetcars trundle past the Garden District, heading toward Uptown. It is barely three weeks since…
New Orleans

A love song for Ernest Gaines

By Jason Berry The novelist Ernest Gaines, who died in his sleep on Nov. 5, 2019, at the age of 86 in his home in Oscar, La., published nine books in a distinguished career. The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman and A Lesson Before Dying, which received the National…
The Church

The last bull: Cardinal Sodano goes out

By Jason Berry A scene in The Two Popes, the charming new Netflix movie, has Anthony Hopkins as a brooding, gentle Benedict XVI hearing the unprompted confession of Cardinal Jorge Borgoglio, played by Jonathan Pryce in an adroit balance of modesty and…
New Orleans

Jazz Great Buddy Bolden Was a Mystery Hollywood Can’t Solve

Filmmaker Dan Pritzker’s biopic “Bolden,” about the horn player credited with inventing jazz, reaches for myth and misses the artist. by Jason Berry Early into Bolden, Dan Pritzker’s artful biopic on pioneering New Orleans jazzman Buddy Bolden, a lush scene unfolds as a hot air…
The Church

Francis must fix cover-up culture that John Paul II enabled

Commentary concludes with call to action for pope By Jason Berry | National Catholic Reporter Editor’s note: Jason Berry was the first to report on clergy sex abuse in any substantial way, beginning with a landmark 1985 report about the Louisiana…
The Church

Institutional lying at heart of the crisis

Insiders, reporters reveal structural deception that hid clergy predators by Jason Berry | National Catholic Reporter Editor’s note: Jason Berry was the first to report on clergy sex abuse in any substantial way, beginning with a landmark 1985 report about the…
The Church

Francis inherits decades of abuse cover-up

Three-part commentary begins with look at how the crisis reached this point by Jason Berry | National Catholic Reporter Editor’s note: Jason Berry was the first to report on clergy sex abuse in any substantial way, beginning with a landmark 1985…
New Orleans

Fr. Jerome LeDoux, revered New Orleans pastor, dies at 88

Published in the National Catholic Reporter. Fr. Jerome LeDoux, 88, one of New Orleans’ most popular priests, died Jan. 7 in Lafayette, Louisiana, after surgery for a double heart bypass. He had for several years been living in active retirement…
New Orleans

A city that winks at sin

New Orleans at 300 When you are raised in a town where the grown-ups wear masks and dance at Mardi Gras parades, it plants a certain optimism for the human experiment. One autumn morning in 1992, over breakfast in Manhattan,…
New Orleans

Louis’ Muse: A Shout-Out for Lil Hardin Armstrong

Published in New Orleans Magazine. August marked 117 years since Louis Armstrong’s birth. With the city’s greatest native son on a rise of planetary value, we should remember the woman who played an early pivotal role. When Armstrong left for…
The Church

Church reform advisers in crosshairs of history

In 2002, The Boston Globe investigation of clergy child abuse ignited widespread media coverage of negligent church officials. As their credibility took a pounding, the US Conference of Catholic Bishops hired R.F. Binder, a Madison Avenue consulting firm specializing in damage control.…