When asked who they donate money to, respondents mostly named local organizations, such as those that support the homeless.

Stephen Markley's new novel is an intimate, long look at a single night in New Canaan, a fictional “corn and rust” town set somewhere between central and northeast Ohio.

We are either human beings, created in the image and likeness of God and endowed with moral agency and free will, or we are merely machines, programmed through laws and regulations, mere code written by the programmers.

“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.”

Is it conceit or coincidence that a saint who was conceived without sin is the patron of a country that believes the same about itself?

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.