Book News

{mosimage}Perhaps what the headlines should have really said was “Stop the presses: Mother Teresa was human after all!” At least then they would have been truer to the underlying message in pretty much all the coverage of the new book of letters, Come be My Light, by Mother Teresa just published.

{mosimage}The Fear of Beggars: Stewardship and Poverty in Christian Ethics by Kelly S. Johnson (William B. Eerdmans,  236 pages, softcover, $24.99.)

Yes, it’s judgmental, but I’ve always been flabbergasted when Christians vote Conservative. The hard, cold policies of Margaret Thatcher and, closer to home, Mike Harris, literally put vulnerable people on the hard, cold streets. One reason for such voting patterns is the fact Christianity, including Catholicism, so often fails to make the crucial links between theology and economics, between finances and ethics. Kelly S. Johnson, professor of religious studies at the University of Dayton, Ohio, ably attempts to fill the gap in her striking new book, The Fear of Beggars.

{mosimage}The Witch of Portobello by Paolo Coelho, translated by Margaret Jull Costa. (HarperCollins, softcover, $29.95 list).

The blurb on the Advance Reader’s Edition of The Witch of Portobello invited me to “discover why Paolo Coelho ranks with J.K. Rowling and John Grisham as one of the world’s most successful writers.” I thought that was a good clue to what was between the covers: magic and suspense, soon to be sold in an airport near you. The kind of work that, when Graham Greene wrote it, he dismissed as “an entertainment.” Meanwhile, Greene’s “entertainments” are studied in English literature classes, and John Grisham’s are not and probably never will be.

{mosimage}Inside A Cutter’s Mind: Understanding And Help Those Who Self Injure by Jerusha Clark and Dr. Earl Henslin (NavPress, paperback, 233 pages, $12.05).

Inside a Cutter’s Mind is a book for those who either injure themselves or know others who harm themselves and want to help them.

{mosimage}Ask the Bible Geek 2: More Answers to Questions from Catholic Teens, by Mark Hart (Servant Books, St. Anthony Messenger Press, 2007, $12.99 U.S.).

Did you ever wonder why at Christmas time we sing all that music even though we call it a silent night? Mark Hart answers this question and dozens more in Ask the Bible Geek 2.

{mosimage}Jesus of Nazareth: From the Baptism in the Jordan to the Transfiguration by Pope Benedict XVI, translated from German by Adrian J. Walker (Random House, hardcover, 400 pages, $32).

Jesus of Nazareth is an erudite, profound, personal and sometimes poetic discussion of the person of Jesus. Always with a thoughtful reflective tone, Pope Benedict explores in detail the sources of Gospel imagery in the Hebrew Scriptures, often in dialogue with Church Fathers and great European and Jewish scholars of the past century.

{mosimage}Conversations with Poppi about God by Robert W. Jenson and Solveig Lucia Gold (Brazos Press, 160 pages).

American theologian Robert W. Jenson and his eight-year-old granddaughter, Solveig Lucia Gold, exchange questions about the Christian faith in their book Conversations with Poppi about God.

{mosimage}Catholic Women in Ministry: Changing the Way Things Are by Marie-Louise Ternier-Gommers (Novalis, 216 pages, softcover, $21.95).

“The laity, however, are given this special vocation: to make the church present and fruitful in those places and circumstances where it is only through them that it can become the salt of the earth.” - Lumen Gentium, 33

The Second Vatican Council document, Lumen Gentium, defines the special role of laypeople in the church. It is now more than 40 years since the Council told the laity to make its contribution to “the sanctification of the world,” and the response has been monumental. It is everywhere around us — in volunteer ministry in our parishes and in professional ministry where the shortage of priests has created opportunities for laypeople to exercise their gifts in hospital, prison and school chaplaincy, in pastoral work in parishes and in education, music and liturgy.

{mosimage}Dispatches From the Global Village by Derek Evans (CopperHouse, softcover, 192 pages, $23.95).

If you asked me today to name a sole companion on a desert island, my first choice — after my husband, of course — would be Derek Evans, former deputy secretary general of Amnesty International. Until now, he was only a name on mailings I would receive in return for my annual donation. But after reading Dispatches From the Global Village — a collection of 38 monthly columns he’s written for his village paper near Penticton, B.C. — I realized here truly was a man described in the foreword by a friend as a “gentle soul with a will of iron… an artist and a scientist” and one who, “in the midst of this global terror, introduces us to a diplomacy of light.”

{mosimage}The Greater Glory, Thirty-Seven Years With the Jesuits by Stephen Casey (McGill-Queen’s University Press, hardcover, 243 pages, $34.95).

The immigrants to Canada in the mid-1800s brought with them their skills, dreams, fears, languages, customs, foods and their religions. As they clung to their heritage and memory from the Old World, they implanted what they considered to be the best of what they had known in Europe. This immigration married their religious expectations and traditions, for better or for worse, with those of the French Canadians who had preceded them in the flight from Europe.