June Newsletter

 

Dear Friends,

 

For us in religious publishing the middle of the year is “award season” and a time of affirmation. Already a number of Orbis authors have been recognized, some more than once.

·       The late Mary Lou Kownacki, OSB, won a First Place (Inspirational) award from the Association of Catholic Publishers as well as a Bronze Medal (Spirituality) from the Illumination Awards for her posthumous collection of reflections drawn from her blog, Everyday Sacred, Everywhere Beauty: Readings from an Old Monk’s Journal.

·       Elizabeth Johnson won a Gold Medal (Theology) from the Illumination Awards and Second Place (Theology) from the Association of Catholic Publishers for Come Have Breakfast: Meditations on God and the Earth.

·       My own edition of Dorothy Day; Spiritual Writings won a Gold Medal (Spirituality) from the Illumination Awards, and a Silver Nautilus Award (Western Religion).

 

Other Association of Catholic Publishers winners:

·       First Place (Theology) for Steve Bevans for his A Community of Missionary Disciples.

·       Elizabeth Donnelly and Russ Petrus, eds., 3rd Place (Ministry) for Catholic Women Preach Cycle C (their third win in a row for this category!). 

Also winning Nautilus Awards:

·       Joyce Rupp, Silver Medal (Conscious Aging) for her bestselling Vessels of Love: Poems and Prayers for the Later Years of Life.

·       Brian Swimme and Monica Deraspe Bolles, Silver (Cosmology) for their extraordinary The Story of the Noosphere.

Meanwhile, our new Spring titles continue to roll off the press.

In Love Made Me an Inventor, David Toole has written one of the most moving Orbis books I have ever read. It tells the story of Maggy Barrankitse--as the subtitle describes her, Humanitarian, Genocide Survivor, and Citizen without Borders. Beginning with the date in 1993 when she witnessed a massacre of 72 of her neighbors in Burundi, and then buried their bodies, it describes how she went on to rescue orphans, founded the life-giving Maison Shalom, risked assassination attempts for standing up to a dictator, and was then forced flee into exile in Rwanda, where she resumed her mission among refugees on an even wider scale. As extraordinary as that story is, her unshakeable trust in God, her sense of mission to be an agent of hope, and her calling to “awaken humanity” offers an even more remarkable witness. 

True Awakening: The Highs, the Lows, and the Mess of Spiritual Transformation by Kerra Becker English is something of a field guild to the spiritual life, written with keen insight and humor: “For all those of us who are in the ‘Don’t bother me until I’ve had at least one cup of coffee crowd.”  She acknowledges that this path is hard, because awakening is just the beginning of a call to grow and change. Is it worth it? Drawing on her own experience, English writes, “The more I lean into following the nudges of the spirit, the more I feel satisfied in my soul, and the more authentically ‘me’ I become.” But spiritual awakening is not for ourselves alone. It awakens us also to the suffering of the world and causes us to ask what we can do about it.

As English writes, “Awakened people awaken others.” May it be so.