As Cardinal Matteo Zuppi, Pope Francis’ special envoy for peace in Ukraine, concluded his three-day visit to Beijing, surprising news came from Moscow.

A Reflection for the Memorial of Our Lady of Sorrows, by Sebastian Gomes

My brother, when did rage become your station?

Jesus says, Woe to your puritan work ethics.

And therefore, all the more believable, That God sent a tiny angel with a chinstrap made of feathered jewels,

Sucked into the belly of an 80-foot sperm whale, scuba diver Jay Gardiner reconciles the loss of his father and challenges the power of the creatures of the sea in Daniel Kraus’s novel 'Whalefall.’

Daniel Hornsby’s new page-turning novel 'Sucker' is consistently funny, a sobering screengrab of our wealth- and power-obsessed nation.

In his debut book, 'The People’s Hospital: Hope and Peril in American Medicine,' Ricardo Nuila presents the conflict between the profit motive of health care and the art of medicine by describing the hospitals that work for people and the hospitals that do not.

In 'The 272: The Families Who Were Enslaved and Sold to Build the American Catholic Church,' Rachel Swarns tells of “one of the largest documented slave sales in the nation," the Jesuit sale of 272 enslaved persons in 1838.

In recent years, several books have attempted to piece together what really happened behind the doors of power in Ireland's Magdalene laundries, including Emer Martin’s novel 'The Cruelty Men,' Claire Keegan’s novella 'Small Things Like These,' and new collection of essays, 'A Dublin Magdalene Laundry: Donnybrook and Church-State Power in Ireland,' edited by Mark Coen, Katherine O’Donnell and Maeve O’Rourke.