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

One Hundred Great Catholic Books. (Bluebridge) Catholic fiction, spirituality, biography, poetry, and theology from the earliest centuries to the present, chosen and introduced by Don Brophy, a former editor at Paulist Press. A good resource for your personal reading program and for your reading group.

The Mass Is Never Ended: Rediscovering Our Mission to Transform the World by Greg Pierce (Ave Maria). A concise and well-written introduction, which views the Mass as the starting point for the Catholic’s mission to the world.

A reader of this blog writes to object to a recent baseball post: “Barry Bonds’ ball has no place in a forum for spirituality,” she complains.

O but it does. Baseball and spirituality are hopelessly entangled. Consider the spiritual lessons learned by Detroit Tigers fans. Our heroes were in the World Series last year. Sunday afternoon they will go home, out of the playoffs. They are the fifth-best team in the American League, and their fans are all disappointed.

Expectations were high at the beginning of the season, and for three months the team played very well. Then, in mid-July, they began to falter. Some of it was bad luck: eleven pitchers were on the disabled list for part of the season. Some of it was age: former stars couldn’t get around on the high fastball any more. Some of it seemed to be that old cliche “lack of concentration.” The Tigers lost and lost again. By early September, an ugly truth was apparent: at least four teams in the American League were better than the Tigers.

It’s a metaphor for the human condition: great expectations and impressive talent followed by mediocre performance and ultimate defeat. Don’t tell me that baseball doesn’t belong on a spirituality blog.

But there’s hope. We’ll watch some terrific baseball in the playoffs and World Series. And there’s next year. The Tigers will be better, and the Yankees and Indians might be worse. I’ll end with Terence Mann’s speech from the movie Field of Dreams:

“The one constant through all the years, Ray, has been baseball. America has rolled by like an army of steamrollers. It’s been erased like a blackboard, rebuilt, and erased again. But baseball has marked the time. This field, this game, is a part of our past, Ray. It reminds us of all that once was good, and that could be again.”

Book sales in Japan are down 15 percent in the last decade, but a new literary genre is booming. It’s the mobile novel: stories written and read on cellphones. More than a million mobile novels are available for download on one website. Many have sold well. The readers are mainly teenagers.

The style of mobile novels is, not surprisingly, extremely concise. The Journal cites this passage describing teenager sweethearts catching a moment of privacy in an empty schoolroom:

Kin Kon Kan Kon (sound of school bell ringing)
(space)
The school bell rang
(space)
“Sigh. We’re missing class”
(space)
She said with an annoyed expression.

The ball that Barry Bonds hit to break Hank Aaron’s career home run record will be branded with an asterisk and given to the Hall of Fame. The owner of the ball allowed fans to vote on the ball’s fate. Nearly half wanted to brand it. Background here. The Hall of Fame will accept the ball. “We’re happy to get it,” said Hall of President Dale Petroskey.

Among the new words added to the new edition of the Oxford English Dictionary are addy (an email address), cattle class (economy seats on aircraft), and garburator a (kitchen waste disposal unit).

But the biggest change, according to the Guardian, is the editors’ decision to drop hyphens. “More than 16,000 have been taken out in cases such as “fig-leaf” and “leap-frog.” Copy-editors take note. Or is it copy editors?

Why did Judas betray Jesus? Can we understand his motive? Can we perhaps forgive him?

These are the questions at the heart of The Last Days of Judas Iscariot, a play by Stephen Adly Guirgis that was first produced in New York in 2005 by the LAByrinth Theater Company. Guirgis decided he needed some theological help. So did Sam Rockwell, a veteran actor who had been cast in the part of Judas. Unknown to each other, Guirgis and Rockwell called Fr. Jim Martin, SJ, an editor at America magazine, and asked him to consult with them. Martin agreed. A Jesuit Off-Broadway is his riveting and utterly unique account of his involvement with the play and the people who created it.

To do the play, Guirgis and the LAByinth troupe urgently needed to master some big issues. Can we believe the Bible? What is sin? How did first-century Jews understand Jesus? What was Jesus’ mission anyway? Martin’s job was to explain all this to a group of largely secular actors under pressure to put a demanding play together quickly. The book’s pace is brisk. It’s evangelism-on-the-fly, the gospel presented as something fresh and new in New York coffee shops and a shabby rehearsal space. Martin makes scripture scholarship, theological reflection, and the classic themes of Christian spirituality the stuff of drama.

There’s much else to like about the book. It’s full of humor. We get to know people like Oscar winner Philip Seymour Hoffman, who directed the play. It shows the exhausting process of creating and staging a professional theater production. A book editor was once asked what kind of manuscripts he was looking for. He replied, “I’m looking for something I’ve never seen before.” I’ve never read a book Like A Jesuit Off-Broadway before.

Fashion designer Marc Ecko paid $750,000 at auction for the baseball that Barry Bonds hit to break Hank Aaron’s record of 755 career home runs. Bonds’ dinger was a bitter moment for many fans. He’s widely suspected of using illegal steroid drugs to transform himself from a skinny, fast outfielder with good power into a hulking, muscle-bound slugger.

Ecko has decided to let fans decide what to do with the home run ball. He’s set up a website that lets fans vote on three options: 1). give the ball to the Hall of Fame; 2). brand the ball with a big asterisk and then give it to the Hall of Fame; 3). shoot it into outer space. Vote here.

I voted for the asterisk. You have to acknowledge Barry’s accomplishment, but it’s a questionable feat. In my opinion, anyway.

New York publishers have long lamented their self-destructive habit of paying huge advances for potential bestsellers that often don’t succeed. Mark Taylor of Tyndale House says that Christian publishers are doing the same thing. He’s done it. An agent will present an attractive idea from an established author. “And then the agent subtly lets us know that other houses are competing for this deal. Our mouths salivate. We want this project.” And Tyndale pays an advance much greater than prudent planning would dictate. The result:

The manuscript comes in. We begin to wonder why we paid so much for this average manuscript. We edit it and market it and sell it and process the returns. And at the end of the day we take a huge write-off. If we’re lucky, the book earns a net contribution to overheads. But in most of these scenarios, the book generates a loss even apart from overheads.

Taylor wants publishers to stop. “It’s like overeating. The antidote for us at Tyndale House is to be willing to push back from the table. If an agent is asking for an advance that feels too high, it probably is too high.”

In today’s Times, Peter Steinfels reviews a new book that probes one of the big issues in biblical studies — namely, the differences between ancient interpretations of scripture and the claims of modern biblical scholarship. The book is How to Read the Bible by James L. Kugel. It contrasts “ancient interpreters,” who read scripture with the eyes of faith, and “modern scholars,” who read these texts with the tools of literary and linguistic analysis. Many modern interpreters of scripture attempt to blend these approaches. Kugel says the two approaches each admirable in their own way, but are fundamentally irreconcilable.

Steinfels hopes this is not so. “Modern minds still seek deeper meanings and still want relevant instructions for living,” he writes. The ancient writers were motivated by a “need to flesh out the command, found in the Book of Deuteronomy and elsewhere, ‘to serve the Lord your God with all your heart and all your soul.’” He asks: “is it so impossible that modern scholarship, too, could be put to that service?”

If you are interested in these questions, read The Spirit of Early Christian Thought by Robert Wilken. It shows how the scripture interpretations of the early Church Fathers flowed from the church’s liturgical and communal life.

Doubt, the dark night of the soul, and Mother Teresa on Comedy Central:

The Wall Street Journal analyzes the surprising success of Eat, Pray, Love, “a chatty recounting of the author’s divorce, spiritual search and self-redemption as she traveled the world.” It sold decently as a hardcover, but clever marketing and strong word-of-mouth attention made the paperback edition a bestseller.

Jerome Weeks offers 8 easy steps to understanding bestsellers.

One point: “Americans confuse spirituality with self-improvement and with financial success. It’s a mix going all the way back to the Puritans, and it’s still selling self-help books like mad.”

Another: “Americans read for plot and character and don’t care a fig about literary style.”

A private equity investment group has acquired three of the five publishers of religion curriculum materials for Catholic schools. In July, CFM Religion Publishing Group acquired RCL/Resources for Christian Living and Benzinger, Inc. Last week, it acquired Silver Burdett Ginn Religion from Pearson Education. CFM is an affiliate of The Wicks Group, a venture capital firm that invests in media and communications companies.

Loyola Press and Sadlier are the other two publishers of Catholic religion curriculum.

All three publishers acquired by CFM publish catechetical and sacramental prep materials, and they have competed with each other. CFM has not discussed its plans, but the acquisitions point to an eventual consolidation in the Catholic curriculum business.

Women read more books than men in every publishing category except history and biography. They comprise about 80 percent of the fiction market. I’ve heard estimates that as much as three-quarters of the readers of religion books are women.

Why is this? The answer (for fiction, at least) may lie in “mirror neurons.”

Located behind the eyebrows, these neurons are activated both when we initiate actions and when we watch those same actions in others. Mirror neurons explain why we recoil when seeing others in pain, or salivate when we see other people eating a gourmet meal. Neuroscientists believe that mirror neurons hold the biological key to empathy.

The research is still in its early stages, but some studies have found that women have more sensitive mirror neurons than men. That might explain why women are drawn to works of fiction, which by definition require the reader to empathize with characters.

I love libraries. All libraries are wonderful places, but some are truly gorgeous. Click here for a compendium of photos of some of the most beautiful.

The libraries of the future will probably reside on the internet, but nothing will replace rooms like these.

The Times reports that Amazon is set to unveil the Kindle, an electronic book reader that technology evangelists hope will cause e-books to finally catch on with mainstream readers. The Kindle will be wirelessly connected to Amazon’s e-book store. This is an advantage over the Sony Reader and other e-book devices which must download books through a computer. A disadvantage of Amazon’s plan is its decision to use a proprietary e-book format. Other devices won’t be able to read Amazon’s e-books. And it won’t be cheap. The Kindle will be priced between $400 and $500.

Will the Kindle make paper books obsolete? That’s doubtful. As a skeptical consultant told the Times, “We have had dedicated e-book devices on the market for more than a decade, and the payoff always seems to be just a few years away.”

I think I’ve seen this video before, but I don’t remember much about it.

“Evangelical Catholicism” is John Allen’s label for the shift that has taken place in the church in the last 30 years. “Beginning with the election of Pope John Paul II in 1978, Catholicism has become a steadily more evangelical church – uncompromising and unabashedly itself. Evangelical Catholicism today dominates the church’s leadership class, and it feeds on the energy of a strong grass-roots minority.”

The term “evangelical Catholicism” isn’t new. I heard charismatic Catholics describe themselves as “Catholic evangelicals” back in the 70s. It was an odd label at the time; Catholics and evangelicals had little in common. But it fit the style of the charismatic renewal, and it does seem to be an apt description of the energy of the church of John Paul II and Benedict XVI.