Recovering the history of black Catholics is an important challenge for all black Americans and for their churches.

Walker Percy: "Writing is a craft like any other. Writers and carpenters had better have respect for the workaday tools of the trade, the feel of the wood under the thumb."

St. Paul does not ask us to spend some of every day in prayer. No, he asks us to pray day and night, in joy and in sorrow, at work and at play, without intermission or breaks.

In 1988, A. Bartlett Giamatti, later the commissioner of Major League Baseball, addressed the American Society of Newspaper Editors. His speech was printed in America .

From 1995: Mother Angelica, devout and well-inten­tioned as she may be, has some big problems.

A month before this Independence Day, a group of 100 scholars warned about “the recent deterioration of U.S. democracy.” America has been covering this topic from all angles; here are highlights from our archives.