As spring training ends and the teams head north to begin the season, let’s listen to John Fogerty’s “Centerfield,” the greatest baseball song ever.
Here’s a performance by Fogerty in 1997. He wrote the song in 1985 after watching the All-Star game from the centerfield bleachers at Candlestick Park in San Francisco.
Online promotion specialist Seth Godin thinks that you should write an ebook. “It’s technically easy and when it works, your idea will spread far and wide. Even better, the act of writing your idea in a cogent, organized way will make the idea better.”
Godin’s complete ebook primer is here.
If you’re a fan of lists, as I am, a Catholic school teacher and sporadic blogger named Nick Senger is your guy.
Senger recently posted a very useful list of “101 Essential Websites for Readers of Literature” on his blog Literary Compass. This list is conveniently subdivided into 18 categories: Genre Fiction, Children’s, Reading Group Resources, Fun, etc.
Senger has also compiled a “Catholic Classic reading list” and “10 Best Books for New Catholics.”
From the Catholic Book Publishers Association:
HARDCOVER
1. Celebration of Discipline
25th Anniversary Edition
Richard Foster, HarperSanFrancisco
2. A Book of Hours
Merton & Deignan, Ave Maria Press
3. Perfectly Yourself
Matthew Kelly, Beacon Publishing/Ballantine Books
4. The Rhythm of Life
Matthew Kelly, Beacon Publishing/Fireside
5. Catechism of the Catholic Church
Doubleday /Our Sunday Visitor /USCCB
6. The Seven Levels of Intimacy
Matthew Kelly, Beacon Publishing/Fireside
7. Lord, Have Mercy
Scott Hahn, Doubleday
8. Rediscovering Catholicism
Matthew Kelly, Beacon Publishing
9. Spiritual Workout of a Former Saint
Danny Abramowicz, Our Sunday Visitor
10. The Holy Longing
Ronald Rolheiser, Doubleday
PAPERBACK
1. Not By Bread Alone: Daily Reflections for Lent 2007
Sherri L. Vallee, Liturgical Press
2. The Screwtape Letters
C. S. Lewis, HarperSanFrancisco
3. Mere Christianity
C. S. Lewis, HarperSanFrancisco
4. Sacred Space for Lent 2007
Jesuit Communication Centre, Ave Maria Press
5. Catechism of the Catholic Church
Doubleday / Our Sunday Visitor / USCCB
6. The Great Divorce
C. S. Lewis, HarperSanFrancisco
7. Good News About Sex & Marriage
Christopher West, Servant Books
8. United States Catholic Catechism for Adults
USCCB Publishing
9. The Kinsey Corruption
Susan Brinkman, Ascension Press
10. Handbook for Today’s Catholic
A Redemptorist Pastoral Publication, Liguori Publications
Paula Huston is a thoroughly modern person who tells a classic conversion story in two recent books. “Journey” is an overused term for accounts of personal spiritual awakening, but it fits Huston’s life. Her story covers many miles, and many changes of mind and heart.
Huston was a lapsed Lutheran and an English professor at a California university when she decided to explore her persistent spiritual longings. She found a peaceful place to pray at a Camaldolese hermitage in the Big Sur, and became a Catholic. Then her story lurched in an unusual direction. She left her tenured teaching job, and embarked on a radical simplification of her life. Some of this involved changes in lifestyle, but the most important changes were interior ones. Huston tells this story with affecting honesty in The Holy Way.
But that was just the beginning. A deeper conversion began, as did St. Augustine’s, when a verse from scripture penetrated her heart. For Huston, it was Jesus’ invitation, “let anyone who thirsts come to me and drink.” This she heard as a call to deeper holiness. Huston writes about her response to this call in her latest book, By Way of Grace.
Her books show Huston to be especially endowed with the virtue of humility, which she defines as the art of honest self-appraisal. It makes for spiritual reading that is both down-to-earth and inspiring.
Fr. Jim Martin has a good article about humor in the latest issue of America. It’s funny too. He tells this story about humor’s capacity to tell the truth to power.
“A friend’s mother was once in the hospital at the same time as the local bishop. After his operation the bishop went from room to room visiting the patients. When he met my friend’s mother, who was recovering from a difficult surgery, he patted her on the head and said, ‘Dear, I know exactly how you feel.’ And she said, ‘Really? When was your hysterectomy?’”
Full text is for subscribers only, but here is a link to a sample.
I love Wikipedia. Just today I used it twice. In the morning I used it to look up The Lord’s Resistence Army in Sudan in connection with a manuscript I’m reading. This afternoon a friend asked whether he should pick Boof Bonser or John Maine as one of his pitchers in his fantasy baseball draft. Wikipedia gave great help in both cases.
So I was bothered recently when Middlebury College in Vermont reportedly banned the use of Wikipedia in student papers. It turns out that the reports were distorted. Middlebury doesn’t like students to cite encyclopedias of any kind in their papers. The professors like primary sources. But the report gave rise to this stirring defense of Wikipedia by a expert in the history of technology. “Why rush to ban the single most impressive collaborative intellectual tool produced at least since the Oxford English Dictionary, which started when a nonacademic organization, the Philological Society, decided to enlist hundreds of volunteer readers to copy down unusual usages of so-called unregistered words.”
Many of the 125 million MySpace users are readers too. They talk about books and writers on their MySpace pages. Thriller writer Barry Eisler has some ideas about how fellow authors can use MySpace to find people who might like their books. “So relax. Meet people. Get to know them. Think in terms of what you have to offer them instead of what you want them to offer you. . . Think about other ways you can offer value. Sure, you’re hoping to sell books, but stop thinking about that — the sales will happen when people feel you’re offering value in other ways.”
It’s been a rough weekend for Jesuit basketball. Seven Jesuit schools started the NCAA tournament; only one is left. Gonzaga, Holy Cross, Marquette, and Creighton were bounced in the first round. Xavier beat Brigham Young, then lost to top-ranked Ohio State in overtime. Georgetown and Boston College played each other yesterday in a battle of East Coast Ignatian powerhouses. Georgetown prevailed, 62-55.
Despite the disappointments, fans of Jesuit basketball should be proud. It’s a notable accomplishment to get seven teams into the NCAA. Hoops mavens think that Georgetown could win the tournament. Go Hoyas.
I arise today
Through the strength of heaven;
Light of sun,
Radiance of moon,
Splendour of fire,
Speed of lightning,
Swiftness of wind,
Depth of sea,
Stability of earth,
Firmness of rock.
I arise today
Through God’s strength to pilot me:
God’s might to uphold me,
God’s wisdom to guide me,
God’s eye to look before me,
God’s ear to hear me,
God’s word to speak to me,
God’s hand to guard me,
God’s way to lie before me,
God’s shield to protect me,
God’s host to save me,
From snares of devils,
From temptation of vices,
From every one who shall wish me ill,
Afar and anear,
Alone and in a multitude.
Christ with me, Christ before me,
Christ behind me,
Christ in me, Christ beneath me,
Christ above me,
Christ on my right,
Christ on my left,
Christ when I lie down,
Christ when I sit down,
Christ when I arise,
Christ in the heart of
every man who thinks of me,
Christ in the mouth of
every one who speaks of me,
Christ in the eye of
every one who sees me,
Christ in every ear
that hears me.
I arise today
Through a mighty strength,
the invocation of the Trinity,
Through belief in the threeness,
Through confession of the oneness
Of the Creator of Creation.
The Catholic philosopher Charles Taylor has been awarded the Templeton Prize, the most prestigious honor in the world of religion. Taylor’s 1999 book A Catholic Modernity?
A Hollywood director has found Jesus’ bones? Fr. Jim Martin discerns a seasonal pattern in the latest anti-Christian sensation-hoax.
It took Ignatius Loyola many years to find the path that God wanted him to take. He eventually saw that the Jesuits were to be men who find God through active service in the world — “contemplatives in action.” A key moment in this process of discernment was a vision Loyola received from God. David Fleming, S.J., describes it this way:
“At a little town called La Storta, with its shrine chapel of Our Lady, Ignatius has an extraordinary mystical experience. He had been praying that Our Lady would place him with her Son. Feeling defeated in his ideal of serving God, Ignatius seems to want assurance of his ‘being with’ Jesus. So Ignatius was imploring Mary to help him to gain a new and deeper intimacy—a renewed ‘being with’—Jesus. Then, maybe, he would be the more ready to ‘work with’ Jesus, whatever service Jesus may indicate. That is the essence of his prayer to Mary, ‘Place me with your Son.’ The response to his prayer is beyond his imaginings.
“Mary does not appear in his vision. What Ignatius sees is God the Father, and Jesus carrying his cross. The Father says to Ignatius that ‘We will be propitious to you at Rome.’ And with that, the Father looks at Jesus and says, ‘I want you to take this man to serve us.’ Jesus, carrying his cross, says to Ignatius, ‘We want you to serve us.’
“Jesus’ use of the word you is plural as reported in this vision. For Jesuits, the plural you has always meant that the grace or charism special to Ignatius is shared with all in the Society of Jesus. Today we would not hesitate to say that the grace or charism of Ignatius is shared with all those who find life in Ignatian spirituality. Jesus, on behalf of the Trinitarian God, is saying to each of us, ‘We want you to serve us.’
“Jesus carrying his cross is also a significant element. Jesus is not on the cross. Jesus is in action—carrying the cross, the ultimate symbol for us Catholics of a divine love poured out. Ignatian spirituality is forever branded by this vision. Love in service.”
For decades, fretful publishers have worried about the reading habits of the younger generation. The refrain has been the same: young people aren’t reading books because they’re too immersed in the latest entertainment medium (radio, television, movies, LP records, video games, the internet, iPods).
Now, says the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, “kids are buying books in quantities we’ve never seen before.” Sales are up, reading is the cool thing to do, and kids are using the new digital media to share books and find good things to read. Much of the credit goes to the increasing sophistication and quality of young adult books. Says one librarian: “There has been an increase in the age of the protagonist, the complexity of the plotting and the gravity of the content. I think it may be a reflection of a more sophisticated teenage population.”
Let’s hope this trend persists.
Pope Benedict XVI will publish two important documents this week. On Tuesday the Vatican will release his Apostolic Exhortation Sacramentum Caritatis (”The Sacrament of Love”), Benedict’s reflections on the Eucharist following the Bishops’ Synod on the Eucharist in 2005. This will be a highly theological work, but the pope recently said that he hope it will help revitalize popular piety.
The other work is definitely aimed at a popular audience. It is “Il Mio Amato Predecessore” — “My Beloved Predecessor,” a tribute to and study of the late Pope John Paul II. It will be published in Italy this week and undoubtedly in other languages soon.
Benedict’s book on the historial Jesus will be published in English on Tuesday, April 10.
Dean Koontz is a publishing superstar. His many books have sold about 300 million copies worldwide. I never finished the one Koontz novel I started, but maybe I gave up on Dean too quickly. I think this after reading Tim Drake’s interview with Koontz in the National Catholic Register, and the accompanying appraisal of the spiritual qualities of his work.
Koontz had a miserable upbringing and became a Catholic while in college. “I feel about Catholicism as G.K. Chesterton did — that it encourages an exuberance, a joy about the gift of life. I think my conversion was a natural growth. Even in the darkest hours of my childhood, I was an irrepressible optimist, always able to find something to fill me with amazement, wonder and delight. When I came to the Catholic faith, it explained to me why I always had — and always should have — felt exuberant and full of hope.”
Koontz the optimist is known for his dark stories. He sees no contradiction. “Evil walks among us. We don’t always see it. Each of us, in our daily lives, encounters evil; we are tempted to evil every day of our lives. If we don’t want to read about it or think about it, I don’t think that’s a truly Christian point of view. We have to acknowledge it, face it and defeat it. That’s what each of my books is about.”
Fern Reiss, who runs the website PublishingGame.com, offers blunt, irreverent, and amusing advice about the publishing business. Here is her list of “five things your best friend won’t tell you about your book.”
Reiss gives good advice about marketing, publicity, and self-publishing. Writers thinking about publishing their own book should read her warning about print-on-demand:
“The novelist with Christian concerns will find in modern life distortions which are repugnant to him, and his problem will be to make these appear as distortions to an audience which is used to seeing them as natural; and he may well be forced to take ever more violent means to get his vision across to this hostile audience. When you can assume that your audience holds the same beliefs you do, you can relax a little and use more normal means of talking to it; when you have to assume that it does not, then you have to make your vision apparent by shock — to the hard of hearing you shout, and for the almost-blind you draw large and startling figures . . .
“St. Cyril of Jerusalem, in instructing catechumens, wrote: ‘The dragon sits by the side of the road, watching those who pass. Beware lest he devour you. We go to the Father of Souls, but it is necessary to pass by the dragon.’ No matter what form the dragon may take, it is of this mysterious passage past him, or into his jaws, that stories of any depth will always be concerned to tell.”
–Flannery O’Connor
The person in charge of the Vatican’s website is Sister Judith Zoebelein, a New Yorker who grew up in the Hamptons, and member of the Franciscan Sisters of the Eucharist. The tech reporter Robert Scoble interviews her here. A Business Week piece about her is here.
Two midwestern blogging nuns have been in the news recently. My friend and colleague Julie Vieira talks to the Chicago Tribune about blogging at A Nun’s Life. Meanwhile, The Duluth paper profiles Sister Edith Bogue, a Benedictine and a professor at St. Scholastica College in Minnesota, who blogs at Monastic Musings.
We love all things Ignatian here at People of the Book, so I’d like to draw attention to the Jesuit Curia’s nifty new website. The site has been expanded and redesigned as part of preparations for the Society’s general congregation next year. The site is full of information about Jesuit ministries, institutions, and people. Of particular interest are the resources for Ignatian spirituality. The portal for this section of the site is here, and it leads to many ways to pray online in the spirit of Ignatius.
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