Bestselling children’s book creators Peter H. Reynolds and Paul A. Reynolds have published a new book in collaboration with the late Pope Francis. In Our Treasures Within (Loyola Press, 2026), the wisdom of Pope Francis is brought to life through words and art by the Reynolds brothers. The picture book invites children on a journey of self-discovery to discern their own gifts—and ponder how they will use them to make the world a better place. Paul Reynolds is a 1982 graduate of Boston College and a part-time faculty member in the Communication Department. He is co-founder and CEO of Fablevision Studios. The Reynolds have collaborated on other children’s books, including Going Places and the Sydney & Simon book series. Read more in Boston College Magazine.
Bringing Pope Francis’ message to children
Ecological community writing
Local Organic: Food Rhetorics and Community Writing for Impact (Utah State University Press, 2025) explores ways to collaboratively build resilient local food systems and coalitions across disciplines and communities. Based on more than a decade of research, teaching, writing, and project-building with undergraduate writing students and project partners, author Veronica House theorizes how work to encourage local community-based writing becomes an ecological thread connecting things, ideas, and people. Local Organic offers writing and rhetoric faculty and graduate students an ecological methodology to produce, teach, and theorize writing to help communities engage with a wide array of social issues and to work toward individual and community-level impacts. House is an associate professor of the practice in the Boston College English Department and director of BC’s Writing Center.
Honoring the legacy of Thomas Groome
A new publication honors the scholarly contributions and legacy of Clough School of Theology and Ministry Professor Thomas H. Groome, a renowned Catholic religious educator and theologian who is retiring after 50 years at Boston College. A Shared Praxis: Renewing Religious Education (Crossroad Publishing, 2026), features essays from religious education scholars from around the world reflecting on the priorities for Christian religious education in the second quarter of the 21st century. The volume’s contributors are among the dozens of graduates from BC’s Ph.D. in Theology and Religion program who have been mentored by Groome. The volume’s contributing co-editors are CSTM faculty members Colleen Griffith and Hosffman Ospino. The book’s title is taken from an educational approach developed by Groome characterized by bringing life to faith and faith to life.
Jane Jacobs
In his new book, Exploring the Thought of Jane Jacobs: The Conversation of Cities (Hamilton Books, Bloomsbury Publishing, 2026), Richard Keeley brings urbanologist Jane Jacobs’ thoughts on cities, nations, and economies into dialogue with today’s urban challenges. Jacobs, who died in 2006, was an influential theorist and activist whose most well-known work is the book The Death and Life Great American Cities. With careful attention to context, Keeley explores Jacobs’ understanding of streets and neighborhoods in cities great and small and her vision of the city as an organism extended through generations. He examines her theories on the dynamics of economic development, the ethics of the workplace, and the difficulties of ethical business practice. The book concludes with a reflection in Jacobsian terms on the need for a politics of place spanning generations. Keeley, who retired from Boston College in 2018, served as Carroll School of Management senior associate dean and director of programs for the Winston Center for Leadership and Ethics at Boston College. It was during Keeley’s tenure as director (1975-1991) of BC’s PULSE Program for Service Learning that he stuck up a long-standing correspondence with Jacobs and convinced her to speak at a symposium on campus. She returned to BC multiple times and donated an extensive collection of her papers, which are housed in the Burns Library.
‘Curiosa Americana’
Cotton Mather, the Puritan minister whose name became synonymous with the phrase “witch hunt” for his connection to the notorious Salem Witch Trials of 1692-1693, is also known for his contributions to medicine and science, notably his advocacy for smallpox inoculation. Mather’s observations and theories related to natural sciences, astronomy, botany, medicine, and the nascent fields of embryology and epidemiology are the focus of a new book, co-edited by Boston College doctoral student Andrew Juchno. Cotton Mather’s Curiosa Americana: Scientific Letters to the Royal Society comprises more than 80 letters Mather wrote between 1712 and 1724 to the Royal Society of London, a collection of letters known as Curiosa Americana. Mather’s letters document New England’s flora and fauna, unusual meteorological events, medical advancements and transatlantic scientific discourse, revealing Mather as a pivotal figure in the early Enlightenment, deeply engaged in the era’s defining debates. Co-edited with Georgia State University Professor Emeritus of English Reiner Smolinski and Yale University Jonathan Edwards Center Director Kenneth Minkema, Cotton Mather’s Curiosa Americana: Scientific Letters to the Royal Society represents the first complete, edited, and annotated collection of Mather’s letters. More from BC News.
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Tagged colonial America, History Department, science
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‘Daughter of Egypt’
Daughter of Egypt (St. Martin’s Press, 2026), the latest novel from Boston College grad Marie Benedict, is about Lady Evelyn Herbert, an archaeologist whose relentless curiosity sends her on a quest to find the tomb of Hatshepsut, Egypt’s lost pharaoh. She risks everything to uncover the truth about Hatshepsut’s reign and keep valued artifacts in Egypt. Hatshepsut and Herbert, two women separated by some 3,000 years, both ultimately changed history forever. Benedict is a bestselling author whose previous works include The Queens of Crime, Lady Clementine, The Mystery of Mrs. Christie, and, with Victoria Christopher Murray, The Personal Librarian. Benedict was interviewed about her book by CBS News.
A critical look at suburban America
In his book Cracked Foundations: Debt and Inequality in Suburban America (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2025), Boston College Assistant Professor of History Michael Glass demonstrates how contemporary issues like the affordable housing crisis and school segregation have their origins in post-World War II suburbanization. Focusing on the archetypal suburbs of Long Island, Cracked Foundations exposes the myth of uniform suburban prosperity, uncovering an American dream built on home mortgages and municipal bonds. Glass further explores how these debt instruments made suburban living financially fragile and entrenched disparities that continue to structure American society. Glass is an urban and political historian of the United States in the 20th century.
‘Yours Always’
Yours Always is the latest novel from Boston College Class of 2014 graduate Corinne Sullivan. Described as a mind-bending tale of dangerous love featuring unreliable narrators, Yours Always is the story of Talia Danvers, an engineer for a high-end dating app, who reconnects with an old boyfriend, Townsend Fuller. Unfortunately, Townsend is the prime suspect in the disappearance of Amanda Reade, the woman who broke up Talia and Townsend in the first place. People warn Talia about Townsend. When Talia starts receiving menacing texts from Amanda, the reader doesn’t know what to believe. Sullivan is the senior news editor at Cosmopolitan, where she covers celebrity and entertainment news. Her first novel was Indecent.
Changemaker
Boston College Lynch School of Education and Human Development Associate Professor Emily F. Gates’ work focuses on the role of evaluation in designing, implementing, and adapting interventions to address complex problems and foster systems change. In a new book, she and co-author Pablo Vidueira critique the “fixed” approach of traditional program evaluation and policy analysis and advance an alternative approach centered on making lasting, transformative change to systems. Evaluative Inquiry for Systemic Change (Sage College Publishing, 2025), demonstrates that systemic change that embeds evaluative inquiry is a theoretically supported, practical way to work toward fundamental social change with lasting impact. The authors offer a clear, five-phase framework for systemic change and a five-element model for evaluative inquiry—ideal for structuring lectures, workshops, and assignments.
Jewish women’s literature
Blending history, collective biography, and literary criticism, the new book West of the Ghetto: Jewish Women, Old San Francisco, and American Literary Culture (Wayne State University Press, 2026) re-positions the American West as a generative space for turn-of-the-20th-century Jewish women’s literature. Author Lori Harrison-Kahan, a professor of the practice in the Boston College English Department, demonstrates that California-based writers Emma Wolf, Bettie Lowenberg, Harriet Lane Levy, Miriam Michelson, and Anna Strunsky played formative roles in Jewish American literary history. Shaped by ethno-religious, gender, class, and settler-colonial dynamics of San Francisco and the frontier, their works challenge masculinist views of Jewish literature and contrast dramatically with well-known stories of the New York ghetto. Mining print and archival sources (including newspapers, magazines, novels, letters, diaries, and unpublished writings), Harrison-Kahan narrates the obscured lives of these pioneering women and considers how literary communities—from bourgeois women’s clubs to socialist bohemia—sustained them.
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