October Publishers Newsletter

Dear Friends,

Each year the church commemorates the feast of St. Mary Magdalene, “apostle to the apostles,” who first proclaimed the good news of Jesus’s resurrection. But there are other women whose names are not remembered. There is the woman who anointed Jesus with precious oil, whose deed, Jesus said, would be told in memory of her. Or the Samaritan woman who described to her neighbors her encounter with Jesus, so that many of them “believed because of her testimony.”

Since then, many women, whether by word or deed, have continued to bear witness to the faith. Thanks to the remarkable, award-winning series, Catholic Women Preach: Raising Voices, Renewing the Church, many of their voices can be heard (and read!). With this volume for the C-cycle, we complete the three-volume series, each offering homilies for every Sunday and holy days of the liturgical year by Catholic women from around the world. As Catherine Hilkert, OP writes in her Foreword: These volumes “offers abundant witness to the fact that the Spirit of God continues to raise up surprising and gifted preachers whose faithful witness and prophetic speech offer the entire church both challenge and hope.”

Two new books by prophetic women also offer words of challenge and hope. Mary Lou Kownacki, who died in 2023, was a Benedictine nun, a poet, peacemaker, and author of a popular blog, “Old Monk’s Journal. Everyday Sacred, Everywhere Beauty, is a lovingly chosen selection of Mary Lou’s reflections, some written near the end of her life. Her words offer timeless wisdom on faith, community, monastic life, and the things that truly matter. As Tom Roberts of the National Catholic Reporter says, “Here’s the mystic, fully engaged, in wonder, in pursuit of justice, in endless questions, seeing God’s face in all of it.”

Megan McKenna is a theologian and popular story teller, who counsels communities facing violence, trauma, and struggle for justice. James Martin, SJ calls her “one of the great Christian writers and practitioners of our time.” In her new book, A Bowl of Perfect Light: Stories of Forgiveness, Reconciliation, and Repairing the World, she combines deep spiritual reflection with engaging stories drawn from many sources, including the Gospels, Native American oral traditions, Jewish Midrash, and more. She shows us how, on the journey of forgiveness, we come to “taste resurrection life.”

Twenty-five years ago, “geologian” Thomas Berry wrote a spiritual classic: The Great Work: Our Way into the Future. In light of the threat to our planet, Berry issued a call to develop the qualities of heart, mind, and consciousness to meet this challenge. That was the “great work” of our age. Celebrating Berry’s prophetic insight  and drawing forth its meaning for today, Brian Edward Brown, one of Berry’s students and co-founder of the Thomas Berry Forum at Iona University, has written Earth's Journey into Hope: Reflections on Thomas Berry’s Great Work. In his Epilogue John Grim describes these reflections as “stepping stones into a future fused with our present and past.”

In challenge and hope,