December Publishers Newsletter
Posted by ida decesaris on
Dear Friends,
You may have noticed our first online Christmas Sale, featuring savings up to 75%. Along with many classics, this sale features our bestselling titles of the year, including James Finley’s The Healing Path,, James Cone’s The Cross and the Lynching Tree, Henri Nouwen’s Ukraine Diary, and biographies of Father Ed Dowling, the spiritual sponsor of Alcoholics Anonymous founder Bill W., and “peace bishop” Thomas Gumbleton, Already have these books, you say? Now is a perfect time to think of gifts that can change the lives of your friends and family!
When Pope Francis addressed the U.S. Congress in 2015 he organized his speech around four “great Americans,” whose message should guide our culture and politics. Two of those figures, Thomas Merton and Dorothy Day, are featured among our new titles.
Dan Horan’s Engaging Thomas Merton: Spirituality, Justice, and Racism is a far-reaching guide to the famous Trappist and his particular relevance today, including aspects of his spirituality and prophetic insights on racial justice and care for the earth.
We are also pleased to issue a new edition of Dorothy Day’s From Union Square to Rome, an early memoir of her conversion, originally published in 1938. Writing to former comrades in the radical movement, she traces the experiences that inspired her conversion to the Catholic faith, and led, ultimately to her founding of the Catholic Worker movement. This new edition includes a Foreword by Pope Francis, who notes that her whole life “exemplified what St. James said in his Letter: ‘Show me your faith without works and I by my works will show you my faith.”
In our time, one of the most important theological expressions of a faith engaged in commitment to the oppressed is Gustavo Gutiérrez’s A Theology of Liberation. The English translation in 1973 was literally the foundation of the Orbis Books program. The 50th anniversary edition, published now, features a new introduction by Michael E. Lee.
Finally, in Church as Sanctuary: Reconstructing Refuge in an Age of Forced Displacement, Leo Guardado offers a timely examination of the historic role of the church as a site of refuge and healing for those on the margins, and issues a challenge for the church to reclaim this role in a time of mass displacement and social dislocation.
All these titles are fitting reflections for this season of Christmas, about which Merton wrote: “Into this world, this demented inn, in which there is absolutely no room for Him at all, Christ has come uninvited. . . . His place is with those others for whom there is no room . . . with those who do not belong, who are rejected by power because they are regarded as weak . . . who are denied status as persons, who are tortured, bombed, and exterminated. With those for whom there is no room, Christ is present in the world.”
May all of you, and those now in our world suffering violence and displacement, know Christ’s peace. 
