News

Dear Friends, I just returned from the annual assembly of the Leadership Conference of Women Religious, a gathering of representatives from most Catholic religious congregations in America. I always look forward to gathering with some of our most informed, discerning, and avid readers. Not surprisingly, their favorites this year—all by women religious--were also are our bestselling titles of the year. First of these is Elizabeth Johnson’s Come, Have Breakfast: Meditations on God and the Earth. Johnson, a member of the Sisters of St. Joseph, is without doubt one of the leading Catholic theologians in the United States, best known for...

Dear Friends, We are delighted to share with you the news of our latest prize-winning titles. As always, these books reflect not only the highest standards, but a range of theological, ethical, ecclesial, and spiritual engagement with the world and our moment in history. From the Association of Catholic Publishers: Excellence in Publishing Awards   First Place (Biography): Mary Frances Coady, Caryll Houselander: A Biography Second Place (Scripture): John Dear, The Gospel of Peace Second Place (Theology): Elizabeth Gandolfo, Ecomartyrdom in the Americas   And from the Catholic Media Association Book Awards (22 Awards)   FIRST PLACE: Books on Pope Francis: James Kroeger,...

Dear Friends, Award season is once again upon us, with our 2024 Nautilus Awards! A Gold Medal in Western Spirituality to Brother David Steindl-Rast for You Are Here: Keywords for Spiritual Explorers. Famous for his promotion of Gratitude as an essential foundation for the spiritual life, Brother David here offers a synthesis of his life-long teaching. My One-on-One interview with Brother David is here. A Gold Medal for Spiritual Memoir to Sr. Jeanne Clark, OP, for All the Way In: A Story of Activism, Incarceration, and Organic Farming. She offers an inspiriting story of her journey as a Dominican sister,...

  Dear Friends,   Bede Griffiths (1906-1994), one of the great pioneers of East-West dialogue, was. an English Benedictine monk. He volunteered in 1955 to establish a monastery in India, drawn by some instinct that there he would discover “the other half of his soul.” He soon came to believe that the secularized West had much to learn from India and its instinctive “sense of the sacred.” Adapting his monastery to Indian culture, he donned the saffron robe of a Hindu holy man, and tried through his worship and in his writings to express the heart of the gospel through...

Dear Friends,            Father William Hart McNichols is widely known as one of the world’s great religious artists and iconographers. We have previously published several volumes featuring his work, including Christ All Merciful and Mother of God, Similar to Fire. My friend Sister Wendy Beckett said of his icons, “When I look at them I fall into prayer, and that’s it. . . They’re not ‘works of art’ in the worldly sense but functional, living theology, uniting us to Our Lord as we look at them.”             Yet the writing of icons came relatively late on...