When teaching U.S. history at the University of Notre Dame, historian Jay Dolan used to ask his students to identify the significance of three dates: 1607, 1608 and 1610.

In “History and Presence,” religion scholar Robert Orsi tells the history of “real presence” — a claim with doctrinally significant meanings for both Catholics and Protestants — by examining stories of “abundant presence” in the lives of ordinary people.

The secular world clings to the idea that the Catholic Church is unchanging. Catholics know better. Pressed to say how, we turn to describing our parish. Perhaps seeing the church in one parish is like seeing the world in a grain of sand. But “Catholic Parishes of the 21st Century,” looks at the big picture, reporting important data and details about parishes, parishioners and parish staffs.

Eileen Markey has written a remarkable book about Sister Maura Clarke, one of the four American churchwomen assassinated in El Salvador in 1980.

Earlier this year, someone recommended an enewsletter with the obscure title “Municipal Archive.” The newsletter itself did not disappoint: brief narrations of author Kio Stark’s interactions with strangers. Sometimes they offered profound moments of connection, other times just funny little anecdotes. But always they were compelling.

Twenty years ago, historian Timothy Walch predicted that Catholic schools would survive into the 21st century and “continue to influence the contours of public education as well as prepare young Catholics for future leadership roles in the Church and in American society.”

Flannery O’Connor is considered one of America’s great writers. While many may be familiar with her short stories such as “A Good Man Is Hard to Find” and her novels such as “Wise Blood,” the...

An Irish-American boy and an African-American boy meet in a Chicago Coliseum boxing ring, each to “fight for his race.”

About halfway through my training as a Jesuit priest, I spent three years working as a high school English teacher on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation in Pine Ridge, South Dakota...

The life of Servant of God Augustus Tolton already reads like a novel but now it is illustrated in full color in a graphic book produced in...