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

From the Catholic Book Publishers Association:

HARDCOVERS

1. Faith, Reason, and the War Against Jihadism.
George Weigel. Doubleday

2. The Dream Manager
Matthew Kelly. Beacon Publishing

3. Mother Teresa: Come Be My Light
Mother Teresa with Brian Kolodiejchuk. Doubleday

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

5. Technology Tools for Your Ministry
Tim Welch. Twenty-Third Publications

6. Rediscovering Catholicism
Matthew Kelly. Beacon Publishing

7. Jesus of Nazareth
Pope Benedict XVI. Doubleday

8. The Rhythm of Life
Matthew Kelly. Beacon/Fireside

9. Simply Christian
N.T. Wright. HarperOne

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

PAPERBACKS

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

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

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

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

5. The Cross, Our Only Hope
A. Gawrych & K. Grove. Ava Maria Press

6. The Only Necessary Thing
Henri J.M. Nouwen. Crossroad

7. The Complete C.S. Lewis Classics
C.S. Lewis. HarperOne

8. On Christian Hope
Pope Benedict XVI. USCCB Publishing

9. Life of the Beloved
Henri J.M. Nouwen. Crossroad

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

The Catholic Digest has published a fascinating interview with Fr. Jim Martin, SJ, about his new book A Jesuit Off-Broadway. The book tells the story of the author’s involvement with the theater troupe that produced the play The Last Days of Judas Iscariot.

The Digest also interviewed actors and the playwright, Stephen Adley Guirgis, who said this about his play:

I do think that the idea in the play that’s borrowed from a lot of Christian philosophers is true: that we’re responsible for our own salvation. In the play it’s like Jesus is right there, and I think Jesus is right there for everyone all the time, but you just have to move an inch. And that can be difficult to do, but I don’t think He goes away. I think even if hell, if you flinch, you wake up in heaven.

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.”

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.

At the height of the sexual abuse scandal several years ago, Boston College editor Ben Birnbaum asked Catholic writers to “reflect on the nature of hope and its sources and uses in our time.” Only one writer said he had no hope. The answers of the other 35 are published in Take Heart: Catholic Writers on Hope in Our Time (Crossroad). Some of the writers tackle hope in theological and philosophical terms. But almost all of the writers, being writers, associate their hope with things: “green chile, a blooded crossroad, a Monday evening meditation group, a subway ride, charm braclets, ‘Danny Boy,’ a neglected church building, and AIDS clinic, and Spanish anarchists,” writes Birnbaum. In other words, hope is everywhere.

Sacred Space: The Prayer Book 2008 (Ave Maria) is the dead-tree version of the hugely popular website www.sacredspace.ie. The website, operated by Irish Jesuits, is a superb destination for daily prayer. The book contains most of what’s on the site. It frees you from the limitations of the internet. You can read it in bed, in the bathtub, on the beach, in church — anywhere.

The Benedictine Tradition by Laura Swan (Liturgical Press) presents Benedictine spirituality through the lives and writings of great saints, scholars, abbots, and martyrs. Swan writes concise essays about 13 Benedictines, along with excerpts from their writings. It’s an excellent way to learn about this great spiritual tradition.

Fr. Jim Martin’s new book A Jesuit Off-Broadway has been named one of the best 100 books of the year by Publishers Weekly. Martin is on the list for the second year in a row. Last year his My Life with the Saints made the list.

Read an excerpt of Jesuit Off-Broadway here. PW’s list of “best books” is here.

Stanley Fish comments on two new books about belief that head in different directions. One is by a former evangelical who is now an agnostic. The other is by a philosopher who has abandoned atheism for a kind of belief. The God question continues to fascinate.

Solanus Casey by Catherine Odell (OSV) is a revised and expanded biography of the beloved Capuchin who had an astounding ministry in the Midwest in the first half of the 20th century. Father Solanus conducted a ministry of healing and spiritual counsel from his post as doorkeeper at the Capuchin monastery in Detroit.

Saints of the Americas by Arturo Perez-Rodrigeuz and Miguel Arias (Loyola Press) features the stories of thirty saints of North and South America. The stories are cleverly presented as “conversations” between the authors and the saints.

Saints in Love by Carole Hallundbaek (Crossroad) looks at four saints who had relationships with a strong emotional component. Francis and Clare are here of course. The author also examines the ties between Teresa of Avila and John of the Cross, Catherine of Siena and Pope Gregory XI, and Francis de Sales and Jane de Chantal.

Saints of Asia by Vincent O’Malley, S.M. (OSV) supplies brief biographies of nearly 100 saints from a continent where the Catholic Church is growing rapidly.

From the Catholic Book Publishers Association:

HARDCOVERS

1. Mother Teresa: Come Be My Light
Mother Teresa with Brian Kolodiejchuk. Doubleday

2. Introduction to the New Testament
Raymond E. Brown. Doubleday

3. Jesus of Nazareth
Pope Benedict XVI. Doubleday

4. The Dream Manager
Matthew Kelly. Beacon Publishing/Hyperion

5. Simply Christian
N.T. Wright. HarperOne

6. Mother Angelica’s Little Book of Life Lessons and Everyday Spirituality
Raymond Arroyo. Doubleday

7. The Apostles
Pope Benedict XVI. Our Sunday Visitor

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

9. Catholic Household Blessings & Prayers
USCCB Publishing

10. Wisdom Books: The Saint John’s Bible
Donald Jackson. Liturgical Press

PAPERBACKS

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

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

3. My Life with the Saints
James Martin. Loyola Press

4. United States Catholic Catechism for Adults
USCCB Publishing

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

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

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

8. My Struggle with Faith
Joseph Girzone. Doubleday

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

10. Seminary Boy
John Cornwell. Doubleday

The Blessing of Christmas (Ignatius Press) is a beautifully-presented edition of seven Advent and Christmas meditations that Joseph Ratzinger wrote while he was Archbishop of Munich. The text is enhanced by gorgeous color illustrations from classic paintings of the Christmas. The Pope says that the meditations have one aim: “to awaken that internal act of seeing which can perceive the truth in the words of scripture: ‘The goodness and loving kindness of God our Savior has appeared to us.’”

The Apostles (OSV) collects 21 talks that Benedict XVI gave during his weekly general audiences in 2006 and 2007. The pope talked about the apostles, their close co-workers, and the origins of the church. OSV has published an accompnaying A Study Guide for the Apostles by Amy Welborn.

The Essential Pope Benedict XVI by John F. Thornton and Susan Varenne (Harper SanFrancisco) is a collection of his most important writings and speeches. Joseph Ratzinger wrote about every important topic in faith and religion. To find out what he thinks, start here.

One of the most appealing of the new fall books is Bert Ghezzi’s The Heart of a Saint: Ten Ways to Grow Closer to God (The Word Among Us Press). Ghezzi writes about ten saints who exemplify different paths to holiness. His goal in writing is intensely practical and pastoral. We’re not to be intimidated by these holy people. Ghezzi wants us to learn from them as we set out on our own paths to holiness.

I especially liked the the chapters on modern saints — Katharine Drexel, Dorothy Day, Pope John Paul II, and Pier Giorgio Frassati. (The picture of Dorothy Day on page 67 alone is worth the price of the book.) He also tells the stories of some saints whom you probably haven’t heard of: Aelred of Rievaulx, Angela Merici, and Roque Gonzalez among them.

Ghezzi has written sixteen books. This is one of his best.

If you want to tackle the Old Testament, the book for you is The Stories of the Old Testament: A Catholic’s Guide by Jim Campbell (Loyola Press). Dr. Campbell guides you through the Old Testament in 100 readings that cover the central texts, essential stories, and major figures. Dozens of informational pieces supply cultural, religious, and political background.

The Bible Made Easy: A Book-by-book Introduction by Timothy Schehr (St. Anthony) supplies a quick and concise introduction to each of the 73 books of the Bible. Fr. Schehr, a scripture professor at St. Mary’s Seminary in Cincinnati, doesn’t quite fulfill the promise of the title, but he gives an brisk and useful introduction.

Praying the Psalms of Jesus by James Sire (IVP) is a close reading of nine psalms that are especially associated with Jesus. Sire’s primary purpose is to deepen our prayer, and he serves this end with solid scholarship and spiritual insight.

The term “evangelical Catholic” is catching on.

John Allen has written that Catholicism has steadily become more evangelical since the arrival of John Paul II in 1978. Now the theologian Robert Barron embraces the term in his new book The Priority of Christ. The book’s subtitle is “Musings of a Post-Liberal, Post-Conservative Evangelical Catholic.” He wants to retire the terms “liberal” and “conservative” replace them with “evangelical.” It means, he says, “that we should be Christ-centered, eager to proclaim the faith, and deeply desirous of bringing people into the mystical body in which we have found such abundant life.” There’s an interview with Fr. Barron here.

The Roman Catholic Church: An Illustrated History by Edward Norman (University of California Press). A gorgeously illustrated book with an excellent text by a leading British Catholic writer. It’s the best short history of the Church that I know.

God’s Continent: Christianity, Islam, and Europe’s Religious Crisis by Philip Jenkins (Oxford). Everything that Jenkins writes is worth reading. Here he argues that Christianity may have a brighter future in Europe than is commonly believed.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.”

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.

Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, the long-awaited conclusion to the Potter saga, will be published a week from Saturday. One of the questions the final book will answer is whether J.K. Rowling’s fantasy will be remembered as an epic with serious Christian content.

Christian themes abound in the the Potter books, and there’s little doubt that Rowling herself is an active, believing Christian. Writing in Books & Culture, literary critic Alan Jacobs lists the mysteries that the final Potter book must answer. The most important is whether Harry will survive. Writes Jacobs:

I do not think he will. I believe that, in one way or another, he will choose death: his life will not be taken from him against his will, as though Voldemort is right in believing that death is the worst thing that could happen to someone; instead, he will give it up, trusting that what Dumbledore told him about “the next great adventure” is true.

Stephen Prothero isn’t buying the conveniently contemporary tone of the latest best-selling interpretation of the so-called “Gospel of Judas” (Reading Judas: The Gospel of Judas and the Shaping of Christianity by Elaine Pagels and Karen L. King.) Pagels and King are “preaching to the ’spiritual but not religious’ choir,” Prothero writes in the New York Times. “The paean to diversity, the suspicion of organized religion, the denunciation of violence in the name of peace — sounds too suspiciously close to contemporary multicultural pieties to be taken as ancient gospel.”

Why do Pagels and King ignore the disturbing portrait of Jesus in the “gospel”? Prothero asks. Jesus is a sarcastic scoffer:

In the Gospel of Judas, Jesus laughs no fewer than four times. He laughs not with his disciples but at them — for worshiping incorrectly and for misunderstanding his teachings. “Teacher, why are you laughing at us?” Judas asks. Good question. Pagels and King devote scant attention to it, responding simply that this laughter is intended to spur Jesus’ disciples on to “higher spiritual vision.” To me, however, it just sounds mean-spirited, turning Jesus into the sort of person you wouldn’t like, much less worship.

HARDCOVERS

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

2. Hebrews
Alan C. Mitchell. Liturgical Press

3. Religious Literacy
Stephen Prothero. HarperOne

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

5. Crossing the Desert
Robert J. Wicks. Ava Marie Press

6. Amazing Grace
Eric Metaxas. HarperOne

7. My Life with the Saints
James Martin. Loyola Press

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

9. Perfectly Yourself
Matthew Kelly. Beacon Publishing/Ballantine

10. The Mundelein Psalter
The Liturgical Institute, Douglas Maris, Hillenbrand Books
Paperbacks

PAPERBACKS

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

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

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

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

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

6. The Sacrament of Charity
Pope Benedict XVI. Pauline Books & Media/USCCB Publishing

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

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

9. Day by Day: The Notre Dame Prayer Book for Students, Revised
Thomas McNally, William George Storey. Ave Maria Press

10. United States Catholic Catechism for Adults
USCCB Publishing
© 2007 Catholic Book Publishers Association

Christianity Today announces its 2007 book awards. The winner in fiction is Dwelling Places by my friend and colleague Vinita Hampton Wright.

New trend in publishing: large-type books for boomers. “More and more middle-aged consumers are looking for large-print books but don’t want to admit that they need large-print books.”

A good week for Mike Aquilina. His new book is published. An old book helps a reader connect with the Catholic Church. And another book gets a good review.

Reformed theologian Richard Mouw rethinks his skepticism about praying to the saints. “I may not feel the need for actual conversations with people who have halos around their heads. But I do need to know more of the stories about what they were like before they earned their halos.”

And finally, St. Augustine himself opens a profile on MySpace. He has 85 friends already. Stick around long enough to listen to the very cool audio track he chose.

The Catholic Press Association handed out 103 book awards in 24 categories at its recent convention in Brooklyn. Orbis Books led all publishers with 16 awards, followed by Paulist Press with 11, Liturgical Press with 10, and Crossroad with 8. Go here for a complete list of the winners.

The first place winner in the category “Popular Presentation of the Catholic Faith” went to Liz Kelly’s May Crowning, Mass, and Merton, published by Loyola Press. The judges called the book “a joyful, heartfelt examination of Catholic life by a woman who has embraced every manifestation of it, from kneelers in church to the Eucharist, from particular prayers to the writing of such diverse authors as Flannery O’Connor and Thomas Merton.”

The winner in the Paperback Spirituality category was Jesus Today: A Spirituality of Radical Freedom by Albert Nolan, published by Orbis. The judges said that “Nolan traces the process of imitating the spirituality of Jesus in the world of today, and leads us through the stages of personal transformation.”

The winner in the Hardcover Spirituality category was My Life with the Saints by James Martin, S.J., published by Loyola. The judges said that “Martin understands that the saints can be wonderful mentors and guides, and in this way he breathes new life into the concept of ‘devotion,’ which has fallen recently on hard times.”

From the Catholic Book Publishers Association. Six of the books (including both #1s) are by Protestants from a secular publisher. And Matthew Kelly returns after a month’s absence.

Hardcovers

1. Religious Literacy
Stephen Prothero. Harper San Francisco

2. Broken Trust
Patrick Fleming, Sue Lauber-Fleming, Mark T. Matousek. Crossroad

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

4. Sunday Celebration in the Absence of a Priest
USCCB Publishing

5. Perfectly Yourself
Matthew Kelly. Beacon Publishing/Ballantine

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

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

8. Rediscovering Catholicism
Matthew Kelly. Beacon

9. Amazing Grace
Eric Metaxas. Harper San Francisco

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

Paperbacks

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

2. The Sacrament of Charity
Pope Benedict XVI. Pauline Books & Media/USCCB Publishing

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

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

5. The Bad Catholic’s Guide to Wine, Whiskey, and Song
John Zmirak and Denise Matychowiak. Crossroad

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

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

8. United States Catholic Catechism for Adults
USCCB Publishing

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

10. The Complete C.S. Lewis Signature Classics
C. S. Lewis. Harper San Francisco

Yesterday was publication day for Pope Benedict’s much-anticipated book Jesus of Nazareth. Newsweek has posted an excerpt on its website, along with a review by George Weigel and an essay by Lisa Miller, who writes “Faith may actually be the most productive approach to finding truth in Scripture; the historical method has so far gleaned very little in the way of facts.”

The excerpt is from Benedict’s discussion of Jesus’ Baptism in the Jordan by John the Baptist. This is a surprising event in scripture. Why did sinless Jesus need to be baptized? Benedict sees it as the beginning of his mission to lift the burden of sin from humankind:

Looking at the events in light of the Cross and Resurrection, the Christian people realized what happened: Jesus loaded the burden of all mankind’s guilt upon his shoulders; he bore it down into the depths of the Jordan. He inaugurated his public activity by stepping into the place of sinners. His inaugural gesture is an anticipation of the Cross. He is, as it were, the true Jonah who said to the crew of the ship, “Take me and throw me into the sea” (Jon 1:12).

I’ve been rereading the Loyola Classics lately and doing some writing about them. I thought I’d post some of what I’ve written here. First up is Edwin O’Connor’s The Edge of Sadness. You can order the book here.

The Edge of Sadness became a bestseller in the sixties in part because of its scandalous elements. Edwin O’Connor took direct aim at the popular stereotype of the Catholic priest in America. This was the picture of the priest as a super-competent, authoritarian, but loveable leader; a wise counselor, a gregarious extrovert, and a heroic celibate (who could nevertheless flirt with the ladies).

Father Hugh Kennedy, the central character of The Edge of Sadness, is a listless, heart-sick, recovering alcoholic. He is trying to renew his priesthood in a decaying inner-city parish, but he can’t connect with his immigrant flock. He’s tormented by his past. He looks on the future with apprehension. This is no Bing Crosby, playing the enchanting Father Chuck O’Malley in “Going My Way.”

O’Connor presents his dyspeptic vision of American Catholicism with considerable literary skill. The Edge of Sadness won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 1962, and the novel is cherished for its psychological perception, memorable characters, and spiritual insight. O’Connor was challenging more than stereotypes about priests. He didn’t buy the cheerful story that the self-assured Irish-dominated American Catholic Church told about itself. Beneath the façade of poise and confidence is a world of loneliness, lost ideals, selfishness, and bleakness of soul. Father Kennedy’s parish is a metaphor for the Church as a whole:

This is not the kind of parish in which a great rapport obtains between the shepherd and his flock. We are all more or less strangers to one another. And most of all, I’m afraid, I’m a stranger in this smallest and dreariest part of my parish where – all moving pictures to the contrary – I can assure you that the priest is not this legendary, revered, and welcome figure, capable of healing with a glance.

The Edge of Sadness reminds readers of a later time why Pope John XXIII was wise to call for a Vatican Council II to update and renew the Church. Renewal has far to go, and some changes might have been ill-advised, but no one should wax nostalgic for the Catholicism of the 1950s.

The novel is suffused with nostalgia of another kind – nostalgia for the vanishing Irish culture that deeply influenced American life in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. O’Connor etches this in his vivid portrait of the large Carmody family, whose involvement with Father Kennedy constitutes much of the plot of the novel. Charlie Carmody, the wealthy 81-year-old patriarch, epitomizes the old garrulous authoritarian style, but his children have become estranged from him. They aren’t Irish anymore. They have become Americans: busy, impatient, modern.

At a Carmody party, Father Kennedy watches Charlie and his cronies talk:

It was the same talk with which I had grown up, the talk which belonged, really, to another era, and which now must have been close to disappearing, the talk of old men and old women for whom the simple business of talking had always been the one great recreation. And so the result was the long, winding, old-fashioned parade of extraordinary reminiscence and anecdote and parochial prejudice and crotchety improbable behavior…the newer, smoother, tolerances had not yet arrived.

At the end of the novel, Father Kennedy is visited by grace. The bishop offers him a new assignment, but he chooses to stay in his dreary, down-at-the-heels parish. He understands he will be there for the rest of his life, something “I felt with a touch of regret, an edge of sadness.” But sadness was only at the edge. Inside was renewed hope that his vocation will be renewed, that he will serve his people well as their priest.

Perhaps Hugh Kennedy’s renewal is a metaphor for a larger renewal that Edwin O’Connor perceived: that a troubled Church contains within itself the seeds of conversion.

John Allen has the first review of Pope Benedict’s Jesus of Nazareth, sure to be the religious book of the year. Allen has been reading the Italian edition. The book will be published in English in the U.S. on May 15.

Allen looks at the book as a Vatican insider. Why this topic? Why now? Because Christology — “striving to put the Jesus of history and the Christ of faith back together again” — is a central concern of this papacy. “Put in a nutshell, Benedict’s thesis in Jesus of Nazareth is that there can be no humane social order or true moral progress apart from a right relationship with God; try as it might, a world organized etsi Deus non daretur, ‘as if God does not exist,’ will be dysfunctional and ultimately inhumane.”