Injustice: How Politics and Fear Vanquished America's Justice System by Carol Leoning and Aaron C. David, Penguin Press, New York, 2025.

From Pulitzer Prize–winning Washington Post reporters Carol Leonnig and Aaron C. Davis, a shocking investigation of unparalleled depth into the subversion of the Justice Department over the last decade, culminating in President Donald Trump upending this cornerstone of democracy and threatening America’s rule of law as we have long known it.

Hearing Bach’s Passions [Updated Edition] by Daniel R. Melamed, Oxford University Press, 2005.

Johann Sebastian Bach's two surviving passions--St. John and St. Matthew--are an essential part of the modern repertory. These large, complex pieces are well loved, but due to our distance from the original context in which they were performed, questions and problems emerge. Bach scholar Daniel Melamed examines the issues we encounter when we hear the passions performed today, and offers unique insight into Bach's passion settings.

The disappearance of ritual by Byung-chul Han, Polity Press, 2020.

Philosopher Byung-Chul Han diagnoses modern social pathologies through the loss of shared ritualistic practices.

Cult and Controversy: The Worship of the Eucharist Outside Mass by Nathan Mitchell, The Liturgical Press, Collegeville, MN, 1982. 

In the first part of this book, Father Mitchell traces the evolution within the Roman Catholic tradition of the cult of the Eucharist outside Mass, a change from holy meal to ritual drama that implied significant alterations of content, meaning, and interpretation. The second section comments on the mandates of Vatican Council II whose call to a return to proper praxis necessitated changes in then current pastoral practice and theological interpretation.

The Man in the Red Coat by Julian Barnes, Alfred A. Knopf, New York, 2019.  

Barnes unfurls stories of the lives that surround Dr. Samuel Pozzi during the Belle Epoque in Paris. Pozzi was a society doctor who pioneered the science of gynecology, a free thinker and a man of science, protestant in a Catholic country and his complicated private life. He was the subject of on of John Singer Sargent’s greatest portraits. A wild tapestry of glamour and pleasure: Oscar Wilde, Sarah Berhardt, Marcel Prut, James Whistler, Henry James and others.  A man who was passionate and whose ideas and achievement were far ahead of his time.