IQUITOS, Peru - As floodwaters rose with heavy rains in this Amazonian city, Graciela Tejada and her neighbours found greasy slaughterhouse offal, human feces and used hypodermic needles floating practically to their doorsteps.

Now is the time Catholics need to prepare for a new urgency and a new way of thinking about our tradition and the natural world. We have to claim a new or renewed intimacy with creation.

TORONTO - People go to hospital in the hope of feeling better. But if patients are welcomed into a forbidding, institutional room with a strange bed, fluorescent lights and cold, hard floor, what then?

3 Moments of the Day by Christopher S. Collins, S.J. (Ave Maria Press, 138 pages, softcover $17.60).

Prayer is a conversation with God — but are we delivering a one-way monologue? It can sometimes be difficult to hear God in prayer. However, 3 Moments of the Day presents a refreshingly simple, straightforward method to help us encounter God not only in prayer but throughout the day. 

The Canny Scot: Archbishop James Morrison of Antigonish, by Peter Ludlow (McGill-Queens University Press, 352 pages, hardcover, $34.95).

For those of us interested in how Church social action really happens, Peter Ludlow has written a fascinating, accessible, full-length biography of Archbishop James Morrison, one of the most important Canadian bishops of the 20th century.

While many men spend time in their man cave drinking beer and watching sports, Todd Stahl would rather pass his time in male solitude with devotions and self-reflection.

Irish Beth Maddock says she gets a lot of calls from God late at night or early in the morning. It is during these quiet hours of the night she “downloads” the ideas God plants in her mind.

The Man Who Learned to Walk Three Times by Peter Kavanagh (Knopf Canada, hard cover, 257 pages, $29.95).

In a poem by the English poet Ted Hughes, a hawk contemplates its physical form: “It took the whole of creation to produce my foot, my each feather; now I hold creation in my foot.”

The Future of the Catholic Church with Pope Francis by Garry Wills. (Penguin, 288 pages, hardcover, $32.95)

At first glance, Garry Wills’ latest book might appear to offer insight into the life and intentions of Pope Francis. But anyone familiar with Wills’ polarizing views might well guess that is not the case. He does discuss Pope Francis — in the introduction and in the epilogue — but his treatment of the Pope is minimal.

WASHINGTON - The sad realities of Syria's civil war permeate the paintings of Essa Neima, a 34-year-old Syrian national.

At a recent exhibit, his oil on acrylic works ranged from depictions of damaged church and mosque mosaics, to a broken icon of Mary and a refugee woman forced into servitude by the need to survive.