ROME — Until a few decades ago, practically everybody attending a Catholic baptism, first Communion or funeral would walk out of the ceremony with a holy card in their pocket or purse. Typically the ...

To Julie Ann Brown, they are “visual scriptures, visual faith.” Brown collects holy cards, simple expressions of faith that have been popular in the Roman Catholic Church for hundreds of years. The ...

We are all familiar with the traditional greeting Le’shana tova tikatevu (“May you be inscribed for a good year”). That particular wording dates back to the Talmudic period in Babylonia, and the early ...

In a used bookstore in Philadelphia, I paid eight dollars for a collection of dead people. Of course, bookstores generally do not deal in cadavers. But they do sell objects imbued with history: a ...

During my most recent visit to Silicon Valley, I stayed in the near-ruins of an old NASA facility across some high-voltage lines from the Googleplex, and I got a new set of prayer cards. Perhaps ...