‘Astranger in a rather strange land” is how Mary Ann Glendon describes herself at one point in her forthcoming memoir, In the Courts of Three Popes: An American Lawyer and Diplomat in the Last Absolute Monarchy of the West (Image, 240 pp., $27). Glendon, a Harvard law professor and human-rights scholar who served as President George W. Bush’s ambassador to the Holy See, recounts her experiences in the Vatican across the past three pontificates, as a diplomat, adviser, and consultant. She writes, with intelligence and grace, from the perspective of an American Catholic laywoman in a “culture dominated by clergy” and as a “citizen of a constitutional republic” in a “court.” A quotation from the English theologian Ronald Knox serves as a well-chosen epigraph for one of her chapters: “He who travels in the Barque of Peter had better not look too closely into the engine room.” Glendon has braved the engine room, and she is clear-eyed about the crises facing the church from within (abuse and corruption) and without (huge cultural shifts). But she cautions readers against cynicism: “A few ordinary people willing to live in truth and to call good and evil by name can help to shift probabilities in a better direction.”

The work of ordinary people trying to serve God should be to excel at their work. So argues David L. Bahnsen in Full-Time: Work and the Meaning of Life (Post Hill Press, 288 pp., $28.99). Bahnsen’s primary professional calling is wealth management; he is also the host of National Review’s Capital Record podcast and a frequent commentator on economics and politics. In his forthcoming book, he mounts an impassioned defense of “an elevated view of work” against its critics in the culture at large and particularly within American Evangelical Christianity. His case is a sociological, economic, and theological one. Citing scripture and Christian thinkers from Dorothy Sayers to John Paul II, he decries a “latent dualism that pits the Kingdom of God against our productive endeavors on earth.” (The notion of “work–life balance,” the work-from-home trend, and pastors with a poor work ethic are among his other targets.) Our labor is not valuable simply as a means to charitable giving or more exalted pursuits, Bahnsen argues, but is an integral part of our identity and a foundation for human flourishing. Work, in other words, is not a necessary evil to be borne until retirement sets us free but a positive good, for individuals and society.

Matthew Scully has been trying to show for three decades that cruelty to animals is an unnecessary evil. Scully, a former literary editor of National Review and speechwriter for President George W. Bush, has long written beautifully on an ugly and unpopular topic. As he writes in the introduction to a new collection of his essays, Fear Factories: Arguments about Innocent Creatures and Ruthless People (Arezzo Books, 302 pp., $18.99), “To concede the obvious: The exploitation of animals, the suffering it entails, and the moral and public-policy choices it presents, aren’t anyone’s idea of crowdpleasing themes.” Readers of NR will recognize many of the pieces gathered here, as a large share of them were first published in this magazine or on its website. Scully invites us to consider why our consciences are untroubled by the large-scale suffering of animals in factory farms, for instance. If our reasons are ignorance and indifference, he aims to dispel them. “It’s no revelation — just a reminder we can all use — that farm animals suffer emotionally as well as physically,” he writes. Even readers who disagree with his cause must concede that his arguments are cogent and powerful.