Kristine M. Crane reports from Rome on Wednesday that the Vatican is urging care for Europe’s despised Gypsies: The Catholic Church is urging governments to have greater respect for Gypsies, as part of the church’s first guidelines on dealing with Gypsies. “While the arrival of other people seeking refuge and `boat people’ mobilizes people and governments, Gypsies’ arrival often provokes rejection, even if they come from impoverished countries, and must often flee because of religious, racial or political persecution,” said Monsignor Agostino Marchetto, secretary of the Pontifical Council for the Pastoral Care of Migrants and Itinerant People. The Church views Gypsies as a people who are inherently religious, but for whom religious affiliation is often as transient as they are since they tend to adopt the predominant local faith wherever they are.

Senior Editor David E. Anderson reviews a book that examines religious photos of the Great Depression: Between 1935 and 1943, the federal government embarked on one of the most remarkable and ambitious artistic projects in American history. Photographers traveled the country making a visual record of the impact of the Great Depression and World War II on the American people. Some 164,000 black-and-white negatives have been preserved in the Library of Congress. Among the fraction of religious photographs are pictures of families saying grace, river baptisms, itinerant preachers, stark wooden churches in rural settings, Salvation Army officers in San Francisco, and boys studying Hebrew texts in rural Colchester, Conn. In “Picturing Faith: Photography and the Great Depression,” Colleen McDannell examines the religious images among the mass of photographs.

Men can now be coached on the art of heartfelt letters, writes Nancy Haught: In this age of e-mails and instant messages, men have lost the knack of writing letters, says Greg Vaughn, a Christian film producer from Texas who teaches men the art of letter-writing. And, no, he doesn’t mean Post-It notes stuck to refrigerator doors, or greeting cards signed “Dad” or “Your Husband.” He is talking about meaningful letters that wives, children and parents will hang on to long after a man’s death, letters that become keepsakes of a loving, enduring relationship. Vaughn, who came up with the “Letters from Dad” curriculum three years ago, has seen at least 5,000 men pass through his classes in churches from Florida to Alaska.