Come to the CTL and join us for a special panel session celebrating our faculty authors who have recently published books. Join us as they share insights into their writing process, discuss their journeys from idea to publication, and answer questions about their work.

Following the panel, we’ll continue the celebration with a happy hour featuring appetizers and drinks—a chance to connect and toast our colleagues’ achievements. Concluding with a raffle to win signed books from the authors!

 

Featuring:

Sex and Sexuality Handbook for the Helping Professional (2025)

By: Alexandra Kriofske Mainella

Sex and Sexuality Handbook for the Helping Professional is designed to serve as a comprehensive guide to facilitate conversations around sex and sexuality. Targeted primarily at helping professionals, the book equips readers with the knowledge and skills to discuss these often-challenging topics in a variety of contexts. It weaves together stories, research, and practical activities to enhance understanding and comfort concerning sexual health.

The text examines themes such as the development of sexuality across the lifespan, the intersection of sexual health with various forms of discrimination, and how to broach the subject of sex in advocacy, educational, mental, and physical health settings. It also covers specific considerations for people with disabilities and discussions around sexual and gender identities. Reflective activities included throughout the text encourage engagement with the material, fostering personal and professional growth.

Sex and Sexuality Handbook for the Helping Professional is recommended for use in courses such as human sexuality, counseling, social work, and healthcare. Additionally, its usefulness extends to professionals in education, counseling, and healthcare who seek to enhance their practice as well as those entrusted with imparting sexual education or parenting guidance.

 

Be Radiant: a Sonata Pome (2024)

By: Jacob Riyeff

Be Radiant, a work in four movements, gathers together scenes of celebratory brooding in the loving eye. Jacob Riyeff’s second collection of poems hopes for home in a passing world, resting in what we’ve been given while awaiting a new heaven and a new earth.

 

An engaging introductory textbook of Catholic theology presented through the thought of Ignatius of Loyola (2025)

By: Conor M. Kelly and Ryan G. Duns, S.J.

Who Will You Become? reimagines an introduction to Catholic theology through the framework of the Spiritual Exercises of Ignatius of Loyola, the founder of the Jesuits. In this textbook, Ryan G. Duns, SJ, and Conor M. Kelly draw on the concept of discernment―praying and meditating before making decisions―in the Jesuit tradition, and they invite readers to engage with the formative potential of theological studies.

This book explains the foundations of Catholic theology in a relatable fashion with practical spiritual exercises for discernment and spiritual growth. Grounding theological concepts in contemporary examples, Duns and Kelly present this accessible introduction to Catholic theology as both a "way of thinking" and a "way of living."

 

What LGBTQ+ Christians Can Teach Us All About Relationships, Inclusion, and Justice Kindle Edition (2025)

By: Dawne Moon and Theresa W. Tobin 

What does the battle between conservative Christians and LGBTQ+ people look like from the vantage point of those who are both?
If a culture war is happening, LGBTQ+ conservative Christians are on the front lines. While many people assume LGBTQ+ people have to say goodbye to the religions they grew up with, and many do, others occupy the intersection of LGBTQ+ existence and conservative Protestantism. Choosing Love shows what happens when two identities that seem diametrically opposed--conservative Christian and LGBTQ+--are joined together within one person.

 

Counting Like a State: How Intergovernmental Partnerships Shaped the 2020 US Census (2025)

By: Philip Rocco

An inside look at the 2020 Census that shows the importance of state and local cooperation in the complex federal project of census taking.

The census plays a foundational, if all too easily ignored, role in the operation of the American state, shaping everything from congressional representation to the allocation of trillions of federal dollars. While census taking aspires to the high-modernist goal of “seeing like a state”—centralizing, standardizing, and homogenizing knowledge about a polity—it is subject to far more conflict and negotiation than final tabulations, maps, or technical documentation make apparent. This is especially true in a large, decentralized polity like the United States where the Constitution entrusts the ultimate authority for the census in the legislative branch.

 

 

Patient Sense: Rhetorical Body Work in the Age of Technology (2025)

By: Lilly Campbell

Technological innovations are rapidly changing the healthcare landscape. When nurses can complete portions of their clinical hours in virtual simulations and medical assistants might spend their entire careers providing patient care mediated by a screen, their understandings of their professional roles change. For future providers, rhetoric is at the heart of learning to communicate with patients and reframing their understandings of expertise.

In Patient Sense, Lillian Campbell introduces a theory of rhetorical body work and applies it to three distinct healthcare contexts: clinical nursing simulations, physical therapy labs, and tele-observation in a virtual intensive care unit. Drawing on sociological frameworks, she defines rhetorical body work as paid physical, emotional, or discursive labor performed at the material or technological interface of worker–client bodies. Such work is devalued within social and institutional systems and often gendered and racialized. Campbell captures the value of providers’ intuitive patient sense in the face of increasingly technology-mediated healthcare and intervenes in conversations about the future of healthcare training. Ultimately, she demonstrates that we will always need responsive healthcare providers whose rhetorical body work and patient sense cannot be replaced by technicians or algorithms.