What Black Elk taught his people was to depend instead on something harder to take away than guns, the trust that prayers in their own language, delivered in their own way, would reach the god they addressed as Tunkashila.

Joyce spent thousands of hours with the Jesuits, who figure prominently in his debut novel.

A hospice chaplain learns that people carry burdensome secrets and regrets, and the prospect of dying makes them want to unload them.

The 19th century witnessed an intriguing range of tsars, from reformist to reactionary or a combination of both.

Maura Clarke might appear to have been a loser in the fight for human dignity. Not so.

For some, El Salvador was a shameful episode, in which Washington backed the perpetrators of a death squad bloodbath in a failed attempt to militarily defeat a homegrown leftist insurgency.