Thornton addresses a puzzle in Vodou and in a number of other African American religious traditions: how Catholic saints came to stand alongside deities drawn from Yoruba and Fon practice.

Two claims carry the argument. The first is that the saints came primarily out of the Catholic Kingdom of Kongo. The second explains why it was the Yoruba-Fon gods in particular who joined them: most religions of Atlantic Africa attach their spirits to a specific place or people, but this tradition has deities that travel and whose authority can extend anywhere, which made them fit company for saints in a way other African deities were not.

Rich and Jean-Charles survey mental health and the psychological professions in Haiti, opening with a compact portrait of the country: its racial and ethnic groups, its population and cities, and a history carrying both proud heritage and present standing as the hemisphere's poorest nation. Religion gets its own treatment — Catholic and Protestant Christianity alongside Vodou — as do crime, poverty, joblessness, substance misuse, and the weight of the 2010 earthquake and other disasters.

The chapter then follows behavioral health services from their origins to the current state of mental hospitals and psychiatric units, dwelling on how few psychiatrists, doctoral psychologists, and master's-level social workers there are, while noting growth in formal training programs and the stigma that still attaches to seeking care.

Considerable space goes to traditional healing, which matters most in rural areas where clinicians are hard to reach: the varieties of healer, and conditions bound to or shaped by culture. A closing section weighs challenges against opportunities.

A large body of research ties organizational effectiveness to leadership; another ties it to culture. What has been missing, Jacques argues, is any account of how the two operate together when an organization is failing, and which of them weighs more heavily. No study had examined the question in the Haitian community at all.

Haitian churches serve as the site. Working phenomenologically, Jacques gathers detailed accounts from eighteen people who belong or once belonged to four congregations in Boston and nearby cities in the northeastern United States, examining organizational structure from the inside through what members have lived.

Culture shapes how these churches function, but leadership proves the dominant influence on how well or badly they do. Their inability to grow and thrive, Jacques concludes, comes down to leaders whose mentality has not evolved with the times; remedying it means deliberately building the right infrastructure and getting proper leadership training.

Between 1824 and 1826, some six thousand free black people left the United States for Hispaniola. Hidalgo works through archives in the Dominican Republic, Puerto Rico, the United Kingdom, and the United States to follow the philanthropic and missionary effort behind that migration.

Earlier writing has read the episode either as a chapter in Black Nationalism in the United States or as the origin story of the community that remained on the island. Hidalgo looks instead at the white participants and what happened to them as they crossed lines of race and culture.

Two figures carry the study. Loring Dewey organized the emigration against powerful opposition, and the archival trail suggests his sense of himself was shaken by what he saw of the emigrants' condition. William Cardy, a British missionary who lived among the settlers, went through something similar: personal crises loosened his attachment to home and drew him toward the people he had come to convert.