All Saints Day is a day to venerate holy men and women—and also to recognize the saints in our midst, complicated though they might be.

From Edgar Allan Poe to Dean Koontz to Flannery O'Connor, America's editors and contributors are not (always) afraid of some horror.

Toni Morrison's fiction conveyed much of the pain, sacrifice and trauma that exemplifies so much of the African-American experience—which is why it makes some white readers uncomfortable.

A Reflection for Thursday of the Twenty-eighth Week in Ordinary Time, by James T. Keane

Sinéad O’Connor's provocative appearance on 'Saturday Night Live' 30 years ago drew cries of outrage. But was some of her anger justified?

Powers’s chosen subjects—in cassocks or nay—are inevitably All-American, and his stories are careful studies of American mid-century life and ambition.

Evelyn Waugh's reputation has endured for almost a century as other novelists have fallen out of fashion. It wasn't because everyone thought him a jolly fellow.

John Irving writes characters who, like Flannery O’Connor’s American South, seem somehow God-haunted.

A Reflection for Thursday of the Twenty-fourth Week in Ordinary Time, by James T. Keane

Science fiction and religion might not seem like the most natural of bedfellows—but religion is usually a prominent theme in most contemporary sci-fi.