October Publishers Newsletter
ida decesaris
Dear Friends,
“I believe in my life story.”
So wrote Pope Francis in a personal “Creed” that he wrote on the day of his priestly ordination. In this prayer he intertwined articles of faith—God, Jesus, the Holy Spirit, Mary (“my Mother who will never leave me alone”)—with moments in his life and aspects of his own personality. “I believe in my pain, made fruitless by the egotism in which I take refuge. . . I believe in the burning death of each day, from which I flee but which smiles at me, inviting me to accept her.”
Each of us has a life story in which, through the eyes of faith, we can also read God’s story. And the same is true for a publishing house. Last year I was invited to give the Cushwa Lecture at Notre Dame and chose the title: “Publishing for a World Church: My Life at Orbis Books.” (Reprinted this month in Commonweal.) I proposed that the story of Orbis over its 55 years offers a perspective on the life of the Church in the post-Vatican II era. Orbis is Latin for “world.” In the beginning this involved our amplification of voices from the “third world”—especially the world of the poor: liberation theology, interreligious dialogue, inculturation. Yet our understanding of the “world” continued to expand, with concern for ecology, and in the spirit of Teilhard de Chardin, the wider story of an evolving universe.
Our program also widened to include the voices of “Modern Spiritual Masters” and others exploring spiritual landscapes in relation to the world today. I concluded my talk with the affirmation and purpose we found in the mission of Pope Francis.
Spiritual journeys are the subject of several new titles. Catherine Cornille has edited Sacred Encounters: Stories of Christian Pioneers of Interreligious Dialogue—a veritable who’s who of Christian theologians (including many Orbis authors) whose own faith has been enlarged by their encounters with other religious paths: Buddhism, Confucianism and Daoism, Hinduism, Islam, and Judaism.
James Finley adds a new volume to his series “Turning to the Mystics,” with Teresa of Avila, the sixteenth-century mystic and Carmelite reformer. Through a close reading of her classic “The Interior Castle,” he guides us toward the living presence of God at the center of our own souls.
Andrew Prevot’s Black Life and Christian Spirituality draws on sources of African American spirituality, including the Spirituals, as well as other sources of Christian prayer and mysticism, including John of the Cross and Ignatius Loyola, to draw a path that is “authentically Black and truly Catholic.”
Finally, spiritual director Tyler G. Hill, in Born Beloved: When Nothing to Prove Becomes Everything, describes a path of awakening for anyone ready to live from a deeper, truer place.
Whether we draw from our encounters with others, with classic teachers, or from the wells of our own experience, we all “create our path by walking it.”
Peace,
Robert Ellsberg
Publisher