July 2025 Publishers Newsletter

Dear Friends, 

I am happy to report that this year Orbis has received, altogether, 20 awards from the Catholic Media Association. As always, these awards reflect the range of our program with books for the scholar and the general reader, for those seeking to understand what is wrong with our world and how it could be different, and those pursuing a faith and renewed church that does justice, that loves peace, and hears the cry of the poor and the cry of the earth.        

            First Place awards went to Elizabeth Johnson for Come Have Breakfast: Meditations on God and the Earth (Spirituality; also Second Place in Popular Presentation of the Catholic Faith); Massimo Faggioli for Theology and Catholic Higher Education; and Alessandra Harris for In the Shadow of Freedom: The Enduring Call for Racial Justice.

            Mark Joseph Williams also won two awards for Torrents of Grace: A Catholic Survivor’s Healing Journey after Clergy Abuse (Second Place, Life and Dignity of the Human Person and Third Place, Memoir).

            Second Place awards went to my edition, Dorothy Day: Spiritual Writings (Spirituality); Christopher Vogt and Kate Ward, eds., Bothering to Love: James Keenan’s Retrieval and Reinvention of Catholic Ethics.

            Third Place awards went to Howard A. Snyder for Francis of Assisi, Movement Maker (History); Libby Osgood, ed., Green Saints for a Green Generation; Mary Frohlich, The Heart at the Heart of the World: Revisioning the Sacred Heart for an Ecozoic Era (Faith and Science); the late Roger Haight SJ for Facing Race: The Gospel in an Ignatian Key (Inclusion in the Church); Perry Schmidt-Leukel for The Celestial Web: Buddhism and Christianity (Interfaith Relations); and Catherine Clifford and Stephen Lampe, eds., Vatican II at 60: Reenergizing the Renewal (Future of the Church).

            Honorable Mentions to Betty Ann Donnelly and Russ Petrus, eds., for Catholic Women Preach, Cycle C, the final volume in their 3-volume series; James Keane for Reading Culture Through Catholic Eyes; Joseph Parappally for Christ without Borders (Christology); and Juan Floyd-Thomas for Critical Race Theology: White Supremacy, American Christianity, and the Culture Wars (Inclusion in the church)

            And lastly, I was honored to be named as one of three Authors of the Year.

            Among all our winners, special note must be taken of Roger Haight, SJ, whose last book was about imagining the social sin of racism as a key for reading the Spiritual Exercises of Ignatius, and who died appropriately on Juneteenth.  Altogether, we published nine of his books, beginning with Jesus Symbol of God, which earned the scrutiny of the Congregation of the Faith, citing “doctrinal errors” and forbidding him to teach Catholic theology. He went on to teach at Union Theological Seminary, New York City, published numerous books on Ignatian spirituality and theological method, and lived to receive the John Courtney Murray Award from the Catholic Theological Society of America. A faithful Jesuit to the end, a great teacher, a kind friend—we shall miss him.

Peace,

Robert Ellsberg

Publisher