“The American narrative of a hard-luck individual working hard, doing the right thing, and finding success for it is so deep in me, my life story so tempting as potential evidence for that narrative’s validity,” Sarah Smarsh writes of her own upwardly mobile economic and intellectual trajectory, “that I probably sometimes err on the side of conveying a story in which I’m an individual beating the odds with her own determination.”

Feminism is both necessary for being a Catholic woman and one of the reasons you will be tested as a Catholic feminist.

This week, we talk with Steven P. Millies about the role of U.S. Catholics in politics.

Andre Dubus III is the author of House of Sand and Fog and a memoir, Townie. A complete collection of his father’s short stories has just been published.

With Father O’Malley, Crosby “concocted a fantasy priest—a perfect, albeit celibate, man.”