This year I’ve been reading a lot of behind-the-scenes books about Broadway musicals. Ted Chapin’s “Everything Was Possible,” about his time as a college intern on Stephen Sondheim and Hal Prince’s “Follies,” is a tremendous work. So is Elysa Gardner’s “Magic To Do,” about the making of the Stephen Schwartz and Bob Fosse musical “Pippin.”

Great works of spirituality are like great poetry, so rich with insight and beauty that they make you want to go slow and savor them.

When astronauts return to Earth, they regularly speak of the profound consolation of the experience of being able to look upon the planet as a whole, how so many of the issues that consume us, the differences of border, nationality or religion, are wiped away in favor of a deep sense of our shared humanity.

Why do we read memoirs? For me, part of the appeal is getting a glimpse into the life of someone who means something to me. But I wonder if it isn’t also that I’m hoping they can give me some kind of insight into my own life.

Why do we read memoirs? For me, part of the appeal is getting a glimpse into the life of someone who means something to me. But I wonder if it isn’t also that I’m hoping they can give me some kind of insight into my own life.

Why do we read memoirs? For me, part of the appeal is getting a glimpse into the life of someone who means something to me. But I wonder if it isn’t also that I’m hoping they can give me some kind of insight into my own life.

I have been telling people to read Ed Marciniak’s 1969 book, “Tomorrow’s Christian,” for more than a decade. The book embraces the Second Vatican Council’s vision of a church with its clergy in the midst of God’s people, leading the church from within to transform the world.

A confession: Rarely do I treat a book as rudely as I did the latest from James Keenan, SJ, “A History of Catholic Theological Ethics.” My copy is dog-eared and marked-up and basically ruined for anyone’s use besides my own.

I don’t know which is harder to believe, that it’s already been 10 years since 20 grade-school children and six educators were murdered by a gunman who attacked the school in Newtown, Connecticut, or that so little has improved. In fact, in every way things seem to have gotten worse. There were 273 reported mass shooting deaths the year after Sandy Hook, according to the Gun Violence Archive. This year there have been 615 in the first 11 months, including in May another mass shooting at a grade school, in Uvalde, Texas. Just in the two weeks since I began thinking about this review, five people were killed at Club Q in Colorado Springs and 17 others injured by a gunman, and six others were killed and four injured by a gunman at a Chesapeake, Virginia, Walmart.