Book News

VATICAN CITY - They say you can feast like a king, and now you can eat like a pope after a young chef from the Vatican’s Swiss Guards published a cookbook featuring the favourite recipes of Pope Francis and his predecessors. 

Fr. John McCarthy has a love of nature that goes back to his early childhood. When he joined the Jesuits, his novice master recognized that his interest in the natural world was profound and encouraged him to make time for it in his priestly life. He has and on a grand scale. 

Here’s something useful for your parish — a concise, practical presentation of creation care theology and ministry in 100 pages. It is written from a Roman Catholic perspective, in easy-to-read language for everybody, not just those with theological or pastoral degrees. 

The world’s environmental crisis reflects a global spiritual crisis, and saving the planet requires a return to a world view centred around God, argues the director of the ecumenical Green Church program in Canada 

With Christians on the run in the Middle East, and Muslim fighters declaring war on the West and modernity, one Muslim scholar wants to talk about Jesus. 

Robert Blair Kaiser’s analysis of what makes Pope Francis tick is a wonderful read and to be promoted. But it’s not what I was expecting.

Crimes Against My Brother by David Adams Richards (Doubleday Canada, hardcover, 416 pages, $32.95).

David Adams Richards is a writer who knows the human soul and reveals it to us in dialogue, plot and inner reflection. It’s the author’s extraordinary access to the truth of being human that makes us care about his characters. We know them, and what brings them joy, pain, hope, despair, guilt and peace matters to us.

Complications: Abortion’s Impact on Women (deVeber Institute for Bioethics and Social Research, 433 pages, softcover, $29.95). 

We often reduce human sexuality to the individual. We concentrate on personal experience, preference and desire. Which is certainly not irrelevant, but it reduces the abortion debate to a question of individual women making individual choices. 

Embracing Edith Stein: Wisdom for Women from St. Teresa Benedicta of the Cross, by Anne Costa (Servant Books, Softcover, 110 pages, $13.99). 

Edith Stein was many things — a Jewish woman from Eastern Europe, a philosopher, an academic, a teacher, a writer, a feminist, a convert to Catholicism, a Carmelite nun, a victim of the Holocaust at Auschwitz, a saint (she was canonized by John Paul II in 1987) and a martyr. Stein was far from a simple person, so it must be said that setting out to write a short compilation (101 pages) of Stein’s thoughts on women and womanhood is a mighty challenge indeed.