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"Reflections and intentional spiritual practices for the growing number of people living at the intersection of contemplation and justice"--

SOCIAL SCIENCE / Activism & Social Justice RELIGION / Ethics RELIGION / Leadership US$20.00 Cover design by: Marco Gallo Cover photo credit: [Orbis Logo] ISBN: 978-1-62698-500-1

Beloved columnist and Catholic cultural and literary critic, James Keane, brings together 50 writers, thinkers, leaders and reflects on their cultural, political, literary, and religious influence. His accessible style brings thought leaders into conversation with a Catholic sensibility, opening insights and bringing a relevance to our cultural, political, and religious moment. Reading Culture Through Catholic Eyes brings us a thoughtful, critical, and accessible window into 50 writers and thinkers of the last century, their influence on culture and often Catholic and religious thought. Based on James T. Keane's popular America magazine columns focusing on cultural figures, firebrands, and significant voices, Keane brings his unique Catholic lens in reacquainting readers with significant and sometimes underappreciated writers and thinkers. Keane's breadth of knowledge of American literary and cultural voices is presented through a background in Catholic theology and spirituality giving the book his signature intellectual depth combined with accessibility--perfect for everyday readers, thinkers, and spiritual seekers wanting an introduction to thoughtful and often influential voices in the public square. With an introduction by New York Times best-selling author James Martin, S.J.

Original essays honoring the work and legacy of James Keenan, Bothering to Love serves as a comprehensive overview of Catholic ethics in global perspective. Essays in this volume attend to themes of fundamental moral theology, virtue, bioethics, marginalization, interreligious ethics, interdisciplinary ethics, and spirituality from international Catholic perspectives.

Can victims of clergy sexual abuse find healing within the Catholic Church that failed them? Clergy abuse survivor Mark Joseph Williams shares his personal journey of spiraling after abuse and trauma into shame, substance abuse, and the isolation that followed. For Williams, confronting evil and his own anger while also realizing his own worthiness despite the agonizing results of trauma provided a starting point for healing. And he discovered something so central to his healing and faith in the place few would look to find it: the church. When he rediscovered the sacraments, he met his liberative healing path, despite and beyond the harms of clergy abuse, their secrets, and political plays of hierarchy--he discovered healing found deep within the Church. And from his unique perspective as a victim seeking redemption, he has counseled both victims of clergy abuse and faith leaders who care about transforming a broken church. And he provides concrete spiritual and institutional path forward of changes to be made in the Church, for justice, wholeness, and humility. By embracing the sacraments, he found a path to peace. Now Williams works to transform a broken church, through accompaniment between harmed and harming. For those abused and disillusioned, he offers hope that the Mystery of the Cross demands a resurrection--that the Church can be renewed by restorative love.

Author applies his "fractal" theory of religions to a comparative study of Buddhism and Christianity. In short, he believes that it is a false stereotype to contrast discrete entities like "Buddhism" and Christianity" without acknowledging the wide variety which is essentially reproduced in different religious traditions. This approach to the varieties of Buddhism overcomes many of the stereotypical distinctions between Buddhism and Christianity, for instance that Buddhism embraces an impersonal absolute, whereas Christianity affirms the primacy of one's relationship with a personal God.

Christ without Borders approaches the mystery of Christ through Indian experiences and perspectives. Parappally develops the critiques of Christian preoccupations without dogmas and doctrines about Jesus Christ that "do not let the mystery of Christ be experienced by those who do not share" Jewish, Greco-Roman, Mediterranean, and Western European worldviews, including philosophical categories. Thousands of people in India and South Asia have experienced "Jesus Christ beyond the boundaries of the Church and its dogmas. They have discovered the mystery of Jesus Christ through their own worldview and express it through their own forms of thought. Do they not contribute something" to Christology as a theological inquiry?

Have you ever thought of yourself as a "vessel of love?" This image speaks to what I envision for the elderhood years. The vast life experiences of the past provided countless opportunities for our love to grow and mature. The persons we have known, what we have done or had done to us, the beliefs stretching our minds and hearts, what we gained and what we shed, the results of our choices and decisions, our deliberate participation in the evolving history of the world--all this and more we bring with us into the final decades. During this lifetime, whether we've been aware or not, a Presence of immeasurable love has been flowing through those experiences, quietly filling the vessel of our inner being. Like vats of matured wine, our ripened goodness has readied itself to move outward. The Beguine mystic, Mechthild of Magdeburg, trusted that "the great flood of divine love never ceases. ...It flows on and on effortlessly and sweetly and without failing until, finally, our tiny vessel becomes full and spills over." Now is the efficacious time to tend "our tiny vessel" so this graced goodness strengthens in us and benefits the life of those we encounter.

It has been over eight years since Pope Francis, in Laudato Si' established care for creation as one of the central themes of Catholic social teaching. Yet that ecological consciousness has yet to take root en masse among the Catholic faithful. In this book, young Catholic women of the "green generation" reflect on saints--canonized and not--who connected their faith to concern for the earth. By connecting well-loved saints to environmental responsibility, the contributors hope to encourage the not-yet informed to become active, inviting younger generations to join the ecological movement, and taking on the responsibility from our elders, newly shouldering the ecological burden for ourselves.

Through stories from Scripture, Jewish midrash, Hassidic tales, stories from Native American culture, and other traditions, McKenna reflects on themes of forgiveness, reconciliation, restorative justice, healing from trauma, and "repairing the world." Includes questions and discussion guides.

Mary Lou Kownacki was a Benedictine nun, poet, and renowned peace activist who co-founded Pax Christi. For years she served as Joan Chittister's writing partner in the Erie, PA, religious community they lived in. But it was in her beloved blog, "Old Monk's Journal," that she delighted readers, sharing her most intimate insights and writings. There, for over 12 years until shortly before her death in 2023, Mary Lou gave readers a rare glimpse into monastic life from the inside. In hundreds of personal blog posts she chronicled current events, reflections on her decades as a nun, stories of friends, poetry recommendations and profound insights on life's purpose and mortality. Follow along as Mary Lou navigates the personal questions, concerns, and joys of her final chapter as a Benedictine woman. Through her experiences of living simply, seeking God, and advocating tirelessly for peace and justice, these pages offer timeless wisdom on faith, community, activism, and what truly matters. For those seeking insight on a life well-lived, these pages offer Mary Lou Kownacki's lasting spiritual legacy.

America's white gaze toward the Black female body locates Black women in a crooked society that misrecognizes and misjudges their moral character. Moreover, the Black Church perpetuates a crooked gospel that reinforces society's mischaracterization theologically. Up Against a Crooked Gospel takes up the narrative of the bent woman in the Gospel of Luke 13:10-17 as ripe for womanist theo-ethical inquiry because it parallels with the historical and contemporary narratives of the Black female body bent multiple by pervasive threats seeking to stifle survival in a multi-traumatic world. Through the perspective of the author's grandmother's story and critical analysis of Black women's salvation politics, Up Against a Crooked Gospel articulates how Black women, in mutual partnership with God, possess "matter" mediated by their bodies necessary to confront a crooked moral fabric within Black religion and the broader American society.

In the 1970s Jesuit theologian Ignacio Ellacuría conducted the Spiritual Exercises (of Ignatius) for the whole Central American province, taking as a reference point the social reality of Central America--giving concrete reference to the meaning of sin, Christ's ministry and passion, and the meaning of discipleship. Haight proposes to do the same thing in reference to the social sin of racism.

This book addresses the dismantling of Vatican II in our Catholic universities, the functional anti-Catholicism that now reigns in even "Catholic" higher education, and the loss of distinctive identity of what it means to be a Catholic thinker today. There is a crisis in American Catholic higher education and it reflects an unease among those who used to identify as Catholic thinkers. Our problem is bigger than the collapse of ecclesial credibility and the behavior of the bishops, and it can't be blamed solely on politics. This book scrutinizes this crisis in detail. Student enrollment is trending down for a variety of reasons--from perceptions about academic competitiveness and future employability to economic conditions related to the pandemic. But in seeking to address these challenges, many schools have put their Catholic identity at risk--namely, by positioning and marketing themselves as part of the mainstream liberal-progressive realm of higher education. Of course, some conservative Catholic institutions have doubled down on Catholic identity, even if in ways that can be concerning. But these schools have a strong natural affinity with certain kinds of Catholics, as well as a supportive institutional partner in the clerical establishment. You could say that liberal-progressive Catholic higher education has no such "core strengths," and that may be partly its own doing. It has embraced deconstruction of the neo-Scholastic hegemony since Vatican II so fully that it's now suspicious of Catholic institutionalism of any kind. It has been too accommodating of the identity politics that have taken root since the 1960s. Massimo Faggioli argues that the Catholic understanding of education needs new life. He has been working in the trenches as a teacher and thinker within the Catholic Church for three decades--first in Europe and then in the US--and he despairs that many of his colleagues now believe there is nothing left to the Catholic intellectual tradition--that is everything is now "post-confessional." Included in Faggioli's argument is a close look at the papacy of Pope Francis. From Laudato si' to Fratelli tutti, it is clear that Francis is leading a movement that rejects Catholic exclusivism and neo-fundamentalism, that critiques neoliberal capitalism, that seeks development of doctrine on the death penalty and the dismantling of a moral rigorism in the service of a bourgeois and conventional Catholicism. This fits well with efforts emphasizing diversity and inclusion as part of a Catholic identity that goes beyond what the canon of Western civilization contains. Yet, the relief brought about by Pope Francis's disavowal of the culture-war agenda can sometimes work as a kind of functional anti-Catholicism, in which Catholicism and Catholic culture are taken seriously only insofar as they support the technocratic paradigm of the contemporary university or one side of the two-party ideological agenda. Paraphrasing Fr. Theodore Hesburgh, Faggioli says that the university is one of the places where the Church does its thinking, and if we lose the "Catholic" university, we will be left with only a reactionary, non-thinking Church.

Enfleshed Counter-Memory reckons with shared stories of trauma from the approach of Christian social ethics. Recognizing both deeply personal tragedies and the massive, systemic, global traumas that intertwine them, Edwards writes that "this communal, visceral trauma...ripples through our corporate body again and again," creating a body that cries out for healing amidst the scabs, scars, and sears on our changed flesh. Yet a practical vision of and for the environments, communities, religious structures, and social spaces in which persons live is most often missing from clinical responses to trauma and ethical inquiries into clinical trauma treatments. Instead of a systematic, constructive, or pastoral theology of trauma, then, Enfleshed Counter-Memory offers a powerful Christian social ethic that advocates emergent, creative forms of healing as the necessary Gospel response to our shared pain.

This series of three volumes, following the A, B, C Cycles of the lectionary, offer homilies by Catholic women from the around the world. This is taken from an ongoing project, "Catholic Women Preach," https: //www.catholicwomenpreach.org/ which has featured videos every Sunday for six years. Though the texts are available on the website, this series will make them available in print form for weekly meditation, an inspiration for homilists, and a resource for courses in homiletics. A project of FutureChurch: see https: //www.futurechurch.org/

Enfleshed Counter-Memory reckons with shared stories of trauma from the approach of Christian social ethics. Recognizing both deeply personal tragedies and the massive, systemic, global traumas that intertwine them, Edwards writes that "this communal, visceral trauma...ripples through our corporate body again and again," creating a body that cries out for healing amidst the scabs, scars, and sears on our changed flesh. Yet a practical vision of and for the environments, communities, religious structures, and social spaces in which persons live is most often missing from clinical responses to trauma and ethical inquiries into clinical trauma treatments. Instead of a systematic, constructive, or pastoral theology of trauma, then, Enfleshed Counter-Memory offers a powerful Christian social ethic that advocates emergent, creative forms of healing as the necessary Gospel response to our shared pain.

Originally published in 1984, For My People is a an important landmark in the development of Black Theology, tracing the origins of the movement, its relation to the Black Church, the engagement with other liberation theologies from the Third World, the challenge of Black women, and reflections on the path ahead. The introduction is by Josiah Young, who finished his PhD with Cone at Union Theological Seminary and now teaches at Wesleyan Theological Seminary in Washington, DC.

Leonardo Boff is the author of many works of Christology over the past fifty years. This is his attempt to present a short synthesis of his work, arguing that the essential foundation of Jesus's identity and mission comes from his intimate identification with God, whom he calls affectionately his Abba.

Amid the dire immediacy of present crises, Living the Way encourages readers to remember our human past and step into our planetary future with the spiritual energy of Thomas Berry. This book critically reflects on the impact and hope of Berry's landmark text The Great Work twenty-five years on from its original publication. In many ways, collective attention to and action for ecological justice has heightened in the intervening years. In yet others, despair, gloom, and an insidious fatalism have grown in the face of multinational powers and crises. With Mary Evelyn Tucker and John Grim, Brian Edward Brown reflects on where we have been to energize today's movements for ecological well-being in their own great work.

We may live in close proximity to others, yet true neighborly connection eludes us. Our communities face extreme segregation by wealth, race, ability, and more. How can we reclaim the meaning of "neighbor" and resuscitate the radical power of Jesus' command to love our neighbor? In this book, Joe Blosser, Executive Director of the Center for Community Engagement, offers new practices of neighbor love to help Christians support just and loving communities. He guides us to live in solidarity with others across differences, exercise sufficiency in our economic lives, and care for the sustainability of our planet and communities. When we align the impacts of our lives with these practices, we foster the shared sense of common good, mutual responsibility, and interconnectedness that Jesus intended. In a world where "neighbor" has become as meaningless as "friend" on Facebook, this book provides a compelling vision for neighboring and radical systemic change that enacts true justice and love.

US$18.00 RELIGION / Christianity / Catholic RELIGION / Christian Living / Social Issues NATURE / Ecology Pope Francis LAUDATE DEUM An Apostolic Exhortation To All People of Good Will on the Climate Crisis With Selections from Laudato Si' Preface by Tomás Insua Introduction by Erin Lothes Biviano "'Praise God' is the title of this letter. For when human beings claim to take God's place, they become their own worst enemies." Cover design by Ponie Sheehan ORBIS LOGO ISBN 978-1-62698-576-6

US$30.00 RELIGION / Christian History RELIGION / Christianity / Saints & Sainthood RELIGION / Christian Ministry / Missions Howard A. Snyder FRANCIS OF ASSISI, MOVEMENT MAKER The Unconventional Leadership of a Simple Saint American Society of Missiology Series #66 ISBN 978-1-62698-574-2 Cover art: Detail from "The Death of St. Francis" by Giotto (1325) Cover design: Regina Gelfer ORBIS LOGO

"Explores the ways in which geographic places influence and are influenced by human life, thought, and action"--

US$32.00 RELIGION / Spirituality RELIGION / Religion & Science RELIGION / Christian Living / Spiritual Growth The One Body of Christ in a Quantum Age Bernard Tickerhoof, TOR Cover design: Ponie Sheehan [Orbis Logo] ISBN 978-1-62698-572-8

US$45.00 RELIGION / Christian Theology / General RELIGION / Christianity / Catholic RELIGION / Christian Ministry / Missions DEEP INCULTURATION Global Voices on Christian Faith and Indigenous Genius Antonio D. Sison, editor Seven leading global scholars of theology and religion look at inculturation from the perspective of indigenous cultures of the Global South and immigrant heritage cultures. ORBIS LOGO ISBN 978-1-62698-571-1 Cover design: Michael Calvente Cover art: "Baptism" by Shahar Caren Weaver. Used with permission.

US$25.00 BIOGRAPHY & AUTOBIOGRAPHY / Religious RELIGION / Christianity / Catholic RELIGION/CHRISTIANITY / Literature & the Arts ALL MY EYES SEE The Artistic Vocation of Fr. William Hart McNichols Christopher Pramuk and William Hart McNichols Foreword by Robert Ellsberg ISBN 978-1-62698-570-4 Orbis logo Cover design: Regina Gelfer. Cover photo by Deborah Johnson

RELIGION / Spirituality RELIGION / Religion and Science NATURE / Ecology Ecological Spirituality Diarmuid O'Murchu Ecology and Justice Series Cover design: Diane Mastrogiulio Cover photo: Pixabay [Orbis Logo] ISBN 978-1-62698-569-8

US$50.00 RELIGION / Christian Theology / Ecclesiology RELIGION / Christianity / Africa RELIGION / Christianity / Catholic TOWARD A SYNODAL CHURCH IN AFRICA Echoes from an African Christian Palaver Ikenna U. Okafor, Josée Ngalula, Nicholaus Segeja, Stan Chu Ilo, editors ISBN 978-1-62698-567-4 ORBIS LOGO Cover design: Diane Mastrogiulio