Servants to Reason & the Pope: A new history of the Jesuits is reviewed at the NY Sun.

Elsewhere, NRO re-runs a Florence King column on favorite books that includes this blurb on Henry Morton Robinson's The Cardinal (1950):

The Cardinal opens in 1915 and traces Steve's rise from Boston parish priest to prince of the church. My favorite parts are the behind-the scenes accounts of how the Vatican works, and the descriptions of the Roman contessa's salon: a hierarchy of ecclesiastical guests, their rank denoted by the colors of their flowing capes and birettas (the book answers all the Protestant questions about vestments), soignée women kissing rings, learned Jesuits swapping bons mots, and Cardinal Merry del Val capping quotations from Horace while juggling oranges. That's what I call a party. It's enough to make me religious.

And this from Company Magazine:

Jesuit Ring Found in Maine

Emerson Baker, professor of history at Salem State College in Massachusetts, discovered a Jesuit ring during an archaeological dig this past summer in South Berwick, Maine. Such rings were brought over in very large numbers by Jesuit missionaries and distributed among those they were proselytizing. A handful of Jesuit rings have been found at sites of Indian villages and French trading posts in Maine, but this is the first to be uncovered at an English site.

“Jesuit rings from the 1600s are not that rare,” says Baker. “The rarity is its location at an English home.” The ring was found during the excavation of what is believed to be an outbuilding at the homestead of Humphrey Chadbourne, a fur trader. Bearing the “IHS” inscription, the ring was most likely dropped by a Native American, says Baker. -- Portsmouth Herald