Garnished with stories of saintly figures and their teachings, Robert Ellsberg's book consists of eight chapters that are like interlocking facets of happiness and holiness.

Summer is the perfect time to catch up on reading those books you’ve set aside for that eschatological someday. With that in mind, I offer a short list of summer reading suggestions. The four books can be characterized as follows: new and fun, sort of new and very interesting, old and wonderfu

Ron Hansen’s new novel is a dollop of sweet cream, an entertainment, a sip of champagne, a screwball comedy, a romp, a bauble, a love letter to Nebraska.

Not long ago a distant cousin, a genealogy buff, sent me an antique clipping from a local paper about a possible ancestor on trial for murder. In the labor wars of the 19th century, scabs did not have much longevity in the Irish factory towns of the Middle West. This long-forgotten enforcer simply p

Sometimes you can hear the moon before it ever rises, moaning from a recent conversation with the lapping secrets of an eastern sea.

Andrew Delbanco has persuasively argued in his book The Death of Satan How Americans Lost Their Sense of Evil that the word evil has all but vanished from the American vocabulary and with it the symbols once used to articulate our experience of evil In the wake of the tragic events of last Septemb