Tom Deignan

Always a deeply Catholic place, the South Bronx has long been associated with poverty, arson and crime. That's slowly beginning to change, thanks in part to immigrants and Catholic faith leaders.

In the real world, as in Lowry's fictional creations, there are not always easy answers. But there remain questions worth asking — and books worth reading.

It has been 20 years since "Doubt: A Parable" introduced a simmering conflict between a reform-minded priest and a traditionally-inclined nun. As the Pulitzer Prize winning play returns to Broadway, how has the American Catholic Church changed?

Book review: Fans of James McBride's The Color of Water will see connections in his new novel, The Heaven & Earth Grocery Store, through which the author opens a door to the skeletons in our national closet.

Book review: In Lincoln's God, Joshua Zeitz writes a compelling chronicle of Lincoln's evolving relationship to faith against a backdrop of events that influenced the Great Emancipator as much as he influenced them.

America's belated embrace of author Octavia Butler has come at a fitting but disturbing time. Her "parables" are uncompromising visions of how we created a cosmic mess — but also what we need to start cleaning up.

James Farl Powers' first short story collection, Prince of Darkness and Other Stories, was published 75 ago, kicking off a celebrated career dedicated to the messy lives of Catholic priests.

Undoing the Knots makes a valid case that "Catholic tradition could be better harnessed to make decisions rooted in justice rather than fear." But its quest for "racial mercy" is often guided by flawed historical details.

Movies: In telling the fictional mobster Tony Soprano's coming-of-age story set in the 1960s, "The Many Saints of Newark" highlights the real history of the city's immigrant Catholic and African American communities.

Book review: God, praised for benevolence, scolded for inscrutability, is a presence in Richard Russo's Empire Falls. "You probably suspect," Russo once told an audience, "I was an altar boy straight through high school."

Commentary: Every December, we return to certain holiday classics, seeking comfort and joy. But 2020 has been a "Twilight Zone" kind of year, and the episode "The Night of the Meek" is quite resonant.

Book review: Kathleen Donohoe's novel is a portrait of an extended family and community, beginning with immigrants in the 1850s, and, later, featuring a pair of Catholic priests forced to confront the AIDS epidemic in the 1980s.

Book review: Stephen Puleo's detailed history explores the charitable efforts Americans — rural and urban, immigrant and native-born, Christian, Quaker and Jewish — made to alleviate Irish suffering in the 1840s.

It will strike astute readers as unsurprising (and dispiriting) that today's critical questions surrounding gender and race were even more urgent for radical reformers throughout the 1800s.

Book Review: Peter Duffy's absorbing history, a page-turner packed with colorful characters and events, paints a broader portrait of an angry, complex era that "precipitated a diplomatic controversy that engaged the highest levels of the American and Nazi governments."

Book Review: Overall, Ben Bradlee, Jr.'s book is an important addition to the booming cottage industry of what might be termed "white working-class studies." But it also misses an opportunity to pursue key questions about two of the hot-button topics — religion and immigration — that catapulted President Donald Trump to the White House.

Book Reviews: On the surface, the illuminating new biography of Eunice Shriver is pure Eunice — eccentric, brash, dismissive of convention. Also Maria Shriver's latest book, a collection of "reflections, prayers, and meditations." 

Book Review: Next year marks the 50th anniversary of Robert Kennedy's assassination, so expect a surge of interest in the one-time Joe McCarthy ally who became a mythic, martyred darling of the left.