January Publishers Newsletter 2026

Dear Friends,

As we flip the calendar page to a new year, we remain hopeful,  uncertain about what lies ahead. With so many examples of violence, cruelty, and propaganda it seems as though 2025 still follows us. Several new Orbis titles address the tension between our hopes and continuing standing trauma.

Andrew Vink’s Common Evil: Political Economy and the Ethics of Liberation, defines a counterpart to ithe “common good,” a foundation of Catholic social teaching that refers to integral human development. His focus is on “common evil,” all the forces and structures that promote “integral dehumanization,” manifest today in many forms, from poverty and war, to deportation raids and defunding social programs. Yet his argument moves toward strategies to overcome this evil, through solidarity, and “the hope that grows through love.”

The lingering wounds and moral injury in the Church stemming from clergy sex-abuse presents another challenge for hope and healing. The team of David Farina Turnbloom, Megan Breen, Noah Lamberger, and Kate Tyschper address this in Liturgy in the Shadows of Trauma: Reckoning with the Roman Catholic Sex-Abuse Crisis. As they note, participation in liturgy is often prescribed as a source of comfort and healing for survivors of clergy-perpetrated sex abuse. However, the diverse forms of trauma inflicted by this crisis all too often threaten the ability of liturgical worship to function as a source of grace. In response they lay out constructive guidelines for how the Church can contribute to the healing process.

Any consideration of Jewish-Christian dialogue must begin with acknowledgment of the long history of Christian contempt for Jews and Judaism in word and deed. In spite of Vatican II when the Church  made a definite break with that tradition of contempt, the stereotypes and negative judgments continue to be reflected in preaching, liturgy, and popular attitudes. In her new book, Blessings of a New Dawn: Reorienting Christianity’s Relation to Judaism, Mary C. Boys offers a succinct account of this history, reviewing how the church, in its first centuries, adopted this attitude of contempt for Judaism, and outlining the possibilities for a “new dawn” rooted in the rediscovery of “the Jewish Jesus.”

In The Books that Made Us: Deconstructing the Modern Christian Classics Rebecca Bratten Weiss revisits some of the “great Christian writers” of the twentieth-century, including Chesterton, Tolkien, Eliot, Waugh, Greene, and O’Connor. In this review of books that largely shaped her early identity, she is now sensitized to some of their unsavory tendencies toward antisemitism, racism, and misogyny. In revisiting these books, and the moral and spiritual imaginary they promoted, she tracks her own pilgrim’s progress in a what is at once a memoir and a vital look at literature.

If it is true that books have the capacity to shape and “make” us, it becomes all the more incumbent on us, as we address the common evil of our times, to offer resources that sustain and promote and promote hope that “another world is possible.”

Blessings,

Robert Ellsberg

Publisher