November Publisher's Newsletter
ida decesaris
NOVEMBER 2026
Dear Friends,
Orbis Books was founded to attend to and amplify voices from the “margins and peripheries,” a perspective that gave rise to a theology and spirituality of liberation. This month we were touched to read a letter posted by the renowned Brazilian theologian Leonardo Boff, who wrote,
“This theology is characterized by having one foot in theological scholarship and the other in work with the poor and oppressed. Thanks to Orbis Books, this perspective--rooted in the world of the poor--was quickly understood.”
That perspective continues to animate our program.
In Outing Blue Privilege: A Call for Public Love Because Public Safety Is Not Enough, Willie Dwayne Francois III pushes readers into activism on behalf of what he calls “public love”—the embodiment, creation of, and advocacy for common goodness, equity, and justice, particularly in the context of policing and mass incarceration. Cornel West lauds this as “the magnificent debut of one of the most brilliant and brave organic intellectuals in this country.” Khalil Muhammed calls it “a summons to reimagine democracy, Christianity, and justice itself.”
The Orbis Books program has also promoted the connection between what Boff calls “the cry of the earth and the cry of the poor.” Indeed, that connection underlies Pope Francis’s call for “ecological conversion,” the recognition of the profound ways in which everything is bound together in God’s creation.
Ilia Delio has been a pioneer in writing a theology that reads the Gospel through the strongly incarnational and creation-centered faith of St. Francis and the evolutionary perspective of JesuitTeilhard de Chardin. In The Christian Mutation: Reclaiming the Dynamic God of Jesus she argues that the birth of Jesus represents a breakthrough to a new understanding of the intimate relation between God and the world. Though this was lost for much of history through the church’s turn to neoplatonic thought, she shows how threads in the Franciscan tradition, the thought of Teilhard, and process theology converge in Pope Francis’s Laudato Si’ and emerging Catholic theology.
In a complementary book, Whitehead’s Universe: A Prismatic Introduction, Andrew M. Davis offers an indispensable guide to Alfred North Whitehead’s process philosophy. John Haught calls it “a work that I believe every serious student and teacher of science, philosophy, and theology would find remarkably enriching.”
Finally, in I AM Speaking to You, popular theologian and storyteller Megan McKenna offers a fresh and inspiring introduction to the Gospel of John as a handbook in the stages of Christian conversion. In such stories as the encounter with Nicodemus, the woman at the well, and the raising of Lazarus, she traces the journey from the beginnings of belief, the confession of faith, the way of discipleship, and initiation into the community of beloved disciples.
As Dorothy Day liked to say, “It all goes together.”
Robert Ellsberg
Publisher