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

“What will life be like if people stop reading?” asks the subtitle in a New Yorker article. The article doesn’t really answer the question, and reading is actually here to stay. But the piece reviews very interesting research about the beneficial cognitive changes that reading brought about in the human mind. Says one researcher, “The secret at the heart of reading is the time it frees for the brain to have thoughts deeper than those that came before.”

From “Flannery O’Connor’s Religious Vision,” an article in the new issue of America by Archbishop George Niederauer:

Still another Catholic fault O’Connor described is, I believe, an evergreen reality in the church: a Jansenistic disdain for human weakness and struggle and distrust of questions, speculations and discussions of any depth. Of the pseudo-faith of such persons she said:

I know what you mean about being repulsed by the church when you have only the Mechanical-Jansenist Catholic to judge it by. I think that the reason such Catholics are so repulsive is that they don’t really have faith but a kind of false certainty. They operate by the slide rule and the Church for them is not the body of Christ but the poor man’s insurance system. It’s never hard for them to believe because actually they never think about it. Faith has to take in all the other possibilities it can.

In considering such people’s self-righteous judgments of others, she made an acute observation: “Conviction without experience makes for harshness.”

The article is here, but behind a subscriber wall.

A philosopher goes negative.

“Isaiah’s discovery that God is beyond compare reveals what may seem a disturbing truth: God is, finally, unknowable. Still, while he is not to be absolutely known, he is apparently willing to reveal something of himself to us at nearly every turn. Think of it like this: he cannot be exhausted by our ideas about him, but he is everywhere suggested.

“He cannot be comprehended, but he can be touched.

“His coming in the flesh — this Mystery we prepare to glimpse again — confirms that he is to be touched.”

–Scott Cairns

From God with Us: Rediscovering the Meaning of Christmas

The Times looks at successful books that have been created from free content on the web. It turns out that many people would rather read a book than read something online. These books “may allay some fears that giving something away means nobody will want to pay for it.”

Before I Go: Letters to Our Children About What Really Matters by Peter Kreeft (Sheed & Ward) is one of the author’s most clever and readable books. (He’s written forty-five of them.) Kreeft, who is a philosophy professor at Boston College, distills his wisdom about what matters into 162 nuggets of entertaining prose. #48 is titled “The Oprah Piss Test.” What’s the difference between books written by tough-minded agnostics (Scott Peck) and tender-minded ones (Mitch Albom)? Books written by the tough-minded will piss off Oprah. Books by the tender-minded never do.

John Paul II: An Evangelical Assessment, edited by Tim Perry (IVP Academic) testifies to the late Pope’s vast impact on all of Christianity. These essays show evangelical Protestant scholars thoughtfully engaging John Paul’s writings. One of them, Timothy George, calls John Paul “our common teacher.”

Forbes has a succinct review of e-book technologies present and future. “Even if Kindle’s hardware doesn’t yet wow users, its competitors’ inventions soon will.”

The AP’s technology writer surveys the sales of e-books. They are catching on in a few niche markets: fantasy game players, some college text buyers, and readers of romance novels.

Powerful forces are lined up to oppose Google’s project to scan millions of books. This piece in the American Standard suggests that Google’s enemies may prevail.

God with Us: Rediscovering the Meaning of Christmas (Paraclete) is a lovely, enormously appealing book that is a companion for prayer and reflection throughout the Christmas season — Advent to Epiphany. It features splendid writers: Scott Cairns, Emilie Griffin, Richard John Neuhaus, Kathleen Norris, Eugene Peterson, and Luci Shaw. It also contains reproduction of great art.

In their reflections, the contributors return to the paradox of Christmas. The season is full of stress and troubles. We fume at iits commercialism and its busyness. And yet it celebrates the Incarnation, which means that God entered our messy world just as it is. Eugene Peterson puts it eloquently:

There is too much stuff, too many things. And all of it festively connects up with Jesus and God. Every year Christmas comes around again and forces us to deal with God in the context of demanding and inconvenient children; gatherings of family members, many of whom we spend the rest of the year avoiding; all the crasser forms of greed and commercialized materiality; garish lights and decorations. Or maybe the other way around: Christmas forces us to deal with all the mess of our humanity in the context of God who has already entered that mess in the glorious birth of Jesus.