People of the Book
A Blog about Book Publishing from a Catholic Perspective

Fr. Jim Martin, SJ, has a thoughtful piece in today’s Times on the recent revelations about Mother Teresa’s darkness of soul. “Her ministry to a doubting modern world may have just begun,” he says.

Google has begun to include book search results at the top of searches. Take a look at these three examples here, here, and here.

Publishers and authors take note. If you’ve ignored Google’s Book Search program, it’s time to get on board. Click here to sign up.

ReadTheSpirit.com is a newly-launched website with big aspirations. It will publish reviews of religion and spirituality books, including “top 10″ lists, and it will eventually become a publisher. The principal figure in the effort is David Crumm, a religion writer for the Detroit Free Press. Crumm says he has private financing for at least two years of the effort, so it bears watching.

The main content on the website now consists of ten grand “21st-Century Principles of Religious Publishing.” These are more “spiritual” than “religious.” They carefully avoid any reference to Christianity, or any other specific religious tradition. The tone and orientation of the site will be undoubtedly become clearer as Crumm reviews books in the weeks to come.

A travel writer for the Times visits the Indian pueblos south of Santa Fe, New Mexico, guided by Willa Cather’s great novel Death Comes for the Archbishop. The novel is based on the life of John Baptist Lamy, who came from France in the mid-19th century to pastor the newly annexed New Mexico Territory. “His great diocese was still an unimaginable mystery to him,” wrote Cather. “He was eager to be abroad in it, to know his people.” Much of what Lamy saw is little changed from his time.

I’m back. Our grandson, our first, was born on August 12, so I dropped everything (including this blog) and took off for Duluth, Minnesota, for a visit. We were delighted to welcome Brett James Kurth — a healthy child in a happy family.

I returned to find this quite interesting article about Mother Teresa in my mailbox. It’s in Time magazine of all places, and the occasion for it is a new book called Mother Teresa: Come Be My Light. After her death, it was revealed that Mother Teresa experienced decades of spiritual desolation. She felt nothing of God’s presence and love as she carried on her heroic work. She describes this unwelcome dark night of the soul in many letters and journal entries collected in the new book.

Why did God hide himself from this great saint? In his book, A Revolution of Love: The Meaning of Mother Teresa, David Scott suggests that Mother Teresa’s experience of doubt and despair was part of her message to us. Mother Teresa was a thoroughly modern saint. She’s the first global saint, transcending cultures in the age of globalization. She was a celebrity in a celebrity-obsessed time. Her fame stemmed from modern visual media, which she manipulated brilliantly.

She championed those left behind in our global rush to opulence: the sick and dying, the third world poor, refugees, neglected children, abused women, the unborn. She embraced these forgotten ones, and insisted that we who are strong embrace them too. It’s hardly surprising, says Scott, that Mother Teresa also embraced spiritual darkness. This too is a characteristic affliction of our age.

The Time article explores some of these ideas. So does Fr. Jim Martin in this commentary on NPR. Check them out.

Seth Godin identifies a paradox that publishers know well. A bestseller emerges unexpectedly; publishers rush to imitate it.

The easiest products in the world to develop, option, license and get to market are copycat products. They are beyond reproach. They feel safe. In actuality, though, most markets aren’t big enough for two blockbusters. The first one dominates the little market, which allows it to break through and capture the attention of the big market. The bestseller creates the problem (I haven’t read that/tasted that/been there) and then solves that problem. The second (and third and fourth and fifth) are trying to sell a solution to people who no longer have the problem.

Godin’s conclusion: “building your own blockbuster is generally a lot easier than copying someone else’s.”

From the Catholic Book Publishers Association:

HARDCOVERS

1. Jesus of Nazareth
Pope Benedict XVI. Doubleday

2. Catechism of the Catholic Church
Doubleday/Our Sunday Visitor/USCCB Publishing

3. Celebration of Discipline, 25th Anniversary Edition
Richard Foster. HarperOne

4. Reasons to Believe
Scott Hahn. Doubleday

5. The Rhythm of Life
Matthew Kelly. Beacon Publishing/Fireside

6. Rediscovering Catholicism
Matthew Kelly. Beacon Publishing

7. Perfectly Yourself
Matthew Kelly. Beacon Publishing/Ballantine

8. Praying with the Creed
Benedict J. Groeschel. Our Sunday Visitor

9. The Seven Levels of Intimacy
Matthew Kelly. Beacon Publishing/Fireside

10. A Book of Hours
Merton & Deignan. Ave Maria Press

PAPERBACKS

1. Catechism of the Catholic Church
Doubleday/Our Sunday Visitor/USCCB Publishing

2. The Screwtape Letters
C.S. Lewis. Harper San Francisco

3. Mere Christianity
C.S. Lewis. Harper San Francisco

4. The Handbook for Today’s Catholic
A Redemptorist Pastoral Publication. Liguori

5. Compendium of the Catechism of the Catholic Church
Libreria Editrice Vaticania/USCCB Publishing

6. The Great Divorce
C.S. Lewis. Harper San Francisco

7. The Return of the Prodigal Sun
Henri J.M. Nouwen. Doubleday

8. God’s To-Do List
Ron Wolfson. Jewish Lights Publishing

9. United States Catholic Catechism for Adults
USCCB Publishing

10. RB 1980: The Rule of St. Benedict
Timothy Frey, Timothy Horner, Imogene Baker. Liturgical Press

Ron Hansen is one of my favorite novelists, and his essay “Faith and Fiction” is a wonderful reflection on the vocation of the Christian writer. I reprinted it in Best Catholic Writing 2007. The essay concludes with this marvelous paragraph:

Writing with faith is a form of praying. Evelyn Waugh maintained that prayer ought to consist of adoration, contrition, thanksgiving, and supplication. And so it is with the writing of fiction, in which authors can adore God through their alertness to creation and to the Spirit that dwells in their talent; confess their own faults by faithfully recording the sins, failings, and tendencies of their characters; offer thanksgiving through the beauty of form, language, and thought in their creations; and beseech by obeying the Rule of St. Benedict, which states: “Whatever good work you begin to do, beg of God with most earnest prayer to perfect it.”

One of the most powerful pieces in Best Catholic Writing 2007 is Rod Dreher’s stunning meditation on the way the Amish community in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania, reacted to unspeakable tragedy. Their children had been murdered; the Amish buried their dead in serene faith and took up a collection for the wife and children of the dead murderer.

“Sometimes, faith helps ordinary men and women do the humanly impossible: to forgive, to love, to heal and to redeem. It makes no sense. It is the most sensible thing in the world. The Amish have turned this occasion of spectacular evil into a bright witness to hope. Despite everything, a light shines in the darkness, and the darkness did not overcome it.”

I just ran across Companion of Jesus, a new website by two young Jesuits that’s intended to celebrate the wisdom of the Spiritual Exercises and to “help souls,” as Ignatius Loyola put it. The site has a list of Jesuit prayers and links to the Spiritual Exercises. Its most interesting feature is a series of web videos that explain the major themes of Ignatian spirituality. Several are available now. A total of ten will be posted on the site through August and September.

This year’s edition of Best Catholic Writing has just been published. Editing this book has been one of my favorite projects at Loyola Press in the past year. What do editors do? Well, this editor gets to read sharp, surprising prose from the Catholic world almost every day, and then make a judgment about what’s “the best.” My judgment is fallible, of course, and I was assisted by others, similarly fallible. But I make no apologies for the choices for Best Catholic Writing 2007. The book is full of great writing.

The best writers include Ron Hansen, Robert Ellsberg, Dawn Eden, John Allen, Philip Jenkins, as well as the Pope. I included several Protestant and Orthodox writers because they write superbly with a sacramental, incarnational perspective that is properly called “Catholic.” (One of them, Rod Dreher, gave the book an excellent review on his widely-read blog.) Click here to see our final choices. You can buy the book here.

To celebrate, I’m going to link to several of the pieces in the book this week, and explain why I think they are exceptional.

Looking for something good to read? Browse the newly-launched LoyolaClassics.com, a nifty website crammed with information about the 19 books in the popular Loyola Classics series. Full disclosure: I’ve been working on this series for three years and I wrote most of the text on the site. But I truly love these books. I’m not embarrassed to urge you to take a look. I hope you love them too.

For each book you’ll find a summary, something about the author, the introduction to the novel, an excerpt, questions for discussion, and links to resources on the internet. Drew Durepos and Linnette Mathys of Loyola Press designed an attractive site that navigates smoothly. Congratulations to them.