With experience at every level of church governance and familiarity with how to build and use power, Leo XIV has the potential to be profoundly consequential.
Books
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Moderates and liberals stopped going to church. We’re only beginning to see the effects.
In ‘The Vanishing Church,’ Ryan Burge presents a data-driven picture of how the American religious and political landscapes have transformed together over the past 50 years.
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Review: Michael Mewshaw’s latest novel dwells in darkness—but offers a way out.
Readers of ‘Not Heaven But Paradise’ may feel like they have been through the hell of our contemporary world and also seen the only way out of the darkness.
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Review: Richard Bausch’s stories of grief, hope and memory
Richard Bausch’s latest collection, ‘The Fate of Others,’ affirms Bausch’s reputation as one of America’s greatest storytellers.
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‘Winnie the Pooh’ made A. A. Milne rich—but not for the reasons he wanted.
A. A. Milne created “Winnie the Pooh” and all his fantastical friends—but was also a novelist, playwright, screenwriter and, by many accounts, a disappointed intellectual.
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Review: Columbia’s former president on Trump’s ‘existential threat’ to universities
In his new book ‘University: A Reckoning,’ Lee Bollinger grapples with the reality that universities across the country are facing—one characterized by challenges to their independence from what he labels “authoritarian” attacks.
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JD Vance can tell a story of conversion. But of communion—not quite yet.
JD Vance’s story suggests he has taken from the church its beauty, its authority and its pedigree but the pews and the people in them he has largely left behind.
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Beach reads, old faves and some seriously hefty tomes: The ‘America’ summer reading list
Some of our recommendations are great beach reads; some are serious history books; and one of them is an old encyclical, because Jesuits gonna Jesuit.
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Review: A counternarrative to American religious history
Matthew Sutton’s ‘Chosen Land’ addresses American religious history as one of a luxurious pluralism—but he often crosses the line into a perhaps-overdone editorial voice that grates on the reader.
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Review: The Big Apple in the 1980s
The New York that Jonathan Mahler describes in ‘The Gods of New York’ is unstable, vulgar and dangerous. But there is much more to the story of the city in the late 1980s.