“The American narrative of a hard-luck individual working hard, doing the right thing, and finding success for it is so deep in me, my life story so tempting as potential evidence for that narrative’s validity,” Sarah Smarsh writes of her own upwardly mobile economic and intellectual trajectory, “that I probably sometimes err on the side of conveying a story in which I’m an individual beating the odds with her own determination.”

William F. Buckley Jr. was more than a prolific writer: He was the brains and coalescing force of a post-World War II philosophy that gradually became known as “conservatism” and which culminated with the 1980 election of Ronald Reagan as president.

Fewer than 200 words are attributed to Mary in Scripture, but those words have inspired innumerable prayers, hymns, sermons and other devotional practices, perhaps none more than her words at the Annunciation.

Dubus was an irascible, loyal, loving, smoking, hard-drinking, hard-punching, tender man, who demanded much of himself and others.

R. O. Kwon's novel startles and unsettles with its insights, as its characters act to prove their beliefs to themselves and to the world, with explosive results.

Nowhere is the contrast between Christian love and hellish indifference more stark than in our prison system.