It's newsletter time! Check out our April edition - last week our Executive Director Malachy Fallon, along with our Board President Paul Fontaine, participated in an important call with the Vatican's Dicastery for Promoting Integral Human Development. Learn more about that, along with some insightful feedback from our blind and visually impaired Board Members in this month's newsletter. We also were excited to have MaryBeth Wise from the National Library Service for the Blind and Print Disabled (NLS) stop by a few weeks ago! She is pictured below with some of our other staff members. As always, we break down all that's new in braille and audio and share social media love from our clients and other organizations. Check it out below - https://xaviersocietyfortheblind.org/april-2025-newsletter (fb)

John Hughes was quite the Renaissance Man. He was a son of Ireland, friend of William Seward and James Buchanan, founder of St. John's College (now Fordham University), builder of St. Patrick's Cathedral on Fifth Avenue, pioneer of parochial-school education, and American diplomat. As archbishop of the Archdiocese of New York in the 1840 and 1850s and the most famous Roman Catholic in America, Hughes defended Catholic institutions in a time of nativist bigotry and church burnings and worked tirelessly to help Irish Catholic immigrants find acceptance in their new homeland. His galvanizing and protecting work and pugnacious style earned him the epithet Dagger John. When the interests of his church and ethnic community were at stake, Hughes acted with purpose and clarity. Learn more about his incredible life in "Dagger John: Archbishop John Hughes and the Making of Irish America" by John Loughery. This title is available in hard copy braille, BRF, and Talking Book! Our Talking Books play in the machines provided by the National Library Service for the Blind and Print Disabled of The Library of Congress. You can listen to a clip here: https://youtu.be/sRO8g3HrgqE Here's a bit more about this title published by Cornell University Press: In Dagger John, Loughery reveals Hughes's life as it unfolded amid turbulent times for the religious and ethnic minority he represented. Hughes the public figure comes to the fore, illuminated by Loughery's retelling of his interactions with, and responses to, every major figure of his era, including his critics (Walt Whitman, James Gordon Bennett, and Horace Greeley) and his admirers (Henry Clay, Stephen Douglas, and Abraham Lincoln). Loughery peels back the layers of the public life of this complicated man, showing how he reveled in the controversies he provoked and believed he had lived to see many of his goals achieved until his dreams came crashing down during the Draft Riots of 1863 when violence set Manhattan ablaze. To know "Dagger" John Hughes is to understand the United States during a painful period of growth as the nation headed toward civil war. Dagger John's successes and failures, his public relationships and private trials, and his legacy in the Irish Catholic community and beyond provide context and layers of detail for the larger history of a modern culture unfolding in his wake. (fb)