When thirty years of untreated bipolar disorder left his father fighting for his life, Howard Schaap began to wonder how this man had fallen so far—from Minnesota’s Young Farmer of the Year to financial failure in the farm crisis to a bed in the neurology wing of Mayo Clinic.

In the final, absorbing volume of his Three Paintings Trilogy, philosopher and critic Morgan Meis explores the art of Joan Mitchell and in particular one of her crowning achievements, the Grand Valley series.

Father Giussani started and directed a series of compact discs, named Spirto Gentil, that included many of the great composers of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, some of the masterpieces of church music, and collections of folk songs from various national traditions.

Gather the Olives is a dangerous book. That’s because it is about peace in a time when peace in the Holy Land is a faraway, even radical notion. It is about hope and food and community and the way there can be solidarity in sharing a meal. Hence the danger: this book might remind its brave readers of how peace is nourished and how hope can’t be extinguished.

There is an ancient Christian saying from the Patristic Era which is known in its most concise form as lex orandi, lex credendi. As the Catechism of the Catholic Church translates it: “The law of prayer is the law of faith: the Church believes as she prays.”

An old man—poet, playwright, essayist, and scholar—sifts through the broken fragments of his memory as he recounts what it was like to grow up in Warsaw during the German occupation of World War II. The result is Kinderszenen, a searing and controversial memoir by a major post-war Polish writer….

This is a book about a girl who left home without quite meaning to. One evening, doing her algebra homework, the sixteen-year-old abruptly realizes the tight-knit fundamentalist community she has been raised in may not have all the answers it claims to have. Then what to do with her familiar, immersive life: Sunday School, church, prayer meetings, vacation Bible school, mother-daughter banquets, midnight vigils, revivals, and car washes?

In the talks and interviews collected in The Miracle of Hospitality, Fr. Luigi Giussani, founder of the international lay movement Communion and Liberation (CL), delves into the source of this miracle—the free gift we call charity.

In Sister Zero, a woman who never wanted children suddenly becomes a mother to her nine-year-old nephew after her sister commits suicide at age 34. Fifteen years later, the boy will also kill himself and in almost exactly the same manner.

With his signature blend of wide-ranging erudition and lively, accessible prose, Morgan Meis explores Franz Marc’s painting “The Fate of the Animals” in depth, guided in part by a series of letters Marc wrote to his wife Maria while he was a soldier in the First World War.

In the fall of 2014, educators Eric and Rixa Freeze moved with their young family to Old Nice in France. They were a family with a plan: to live differently.