August Publishers Newsletter

Dear Friends,

             While the feast of St. Francis of Assisi, undoubtedly the world’s most popular saint, is observed on October 4among Franciscans, October 3, the anniversary of his death in 1226, is celebrated as the feast of his Transitus—Latin for “passage” or crossing over. This year marks the 800^th anniversary of that passage. And at Orbis, our celebration of this jubilee begins this month with the reissue of several classic works.

            Murray Bodo OFM is a beloved author of many books on the life and spirituality of Francis. Among these, his first, Francis: The Journey and the Dream, with almost a quarter million sales, remains his most popular. John Michael Talbot, in his foreword to this “spiritual gem,” calls it his “first love,” the book that inspired him to embark on the Franciscan path.

            Theologian Ilia Delio OSF is the author of a dozen bestselling Orbis titles on themes inspired by Teilhard de Chardin and the implications of evolution on religion. But her own spiritual roots begin with Sts. Francis and Clare. Two of our new reprints draw on her deep immersion in Franciscan spirituality and its relevance for spiritual practice today. Compassion: Living in the Spirit of St. Francis reflects on the role of compassion as the key to Francis’s “transformation into love”: “Francis entered the world of the stranger and made the stranger into a brother. He learned to love what was weak and fragile and he learned to care for what the world discarded.”

            Ilia is also the author of The Humility of God: A Franciscan Perspective--a must-read for anyone interested in Franciscan theology. Here, Delio invites us to contemplate God’s humility, being born in a manger, and to be transformed by the same divine dimension that set the Franciscan way into motion.

                Of related interest for spiritual readers is Teresa Rhodes’s new book, Mysteries of the Rosary in Ordinary Life. Through a series of stories Teresa reflects on the way in which the events of Mary and Jesus’s lives intersect our own experience, focus our prayers, and renew our hearts. Each story is its own meditation on a mystery of the rosary and, as such, is a point of entry into the entire story of God’s humility and compassion.

Finally, Diarmuid O’Murchu, the author of over a dozen Orbis titles, has written a spiritual memoir, Paschal Paradox: Reflections on a Life of Spiritual Revolution. Fr. O’Murchu calls this an “autobiography with a mystical twist.” Rather than a chronological outline of his life, he instead reflects “on those times that might be described as quantum leaps in which the extraordinary infiltrated the ordinary, and from there on the territory never looked the same again.”

St. Francis, as his death was approaching, praised “Sister Bodily Death” and uttered his final words—a message directed as much to all of us as it was to his followers 800 years ago: “I have done what is mine; may Christ teach you what is yours.”

Peace and Good,

Robert Ellsberg

Publisher