faithAlivebooks Blog

How To Start Your Own Book Club

Oprah Magazine presents an extensive set of guidelines for Starting a Book Club.

Voices of Power and Passion

"Voices of Power and Passion: the Best U.S. Catholic Writers" by Brian Doyle appeared in the recent issue of Liguorian Magazine.

Let's cut right to the chase. A handful of U.S. Catholic writers and books and essays and poems and songs are absolutely indispensable. These creative works should be required reading and/or listening for every man, woman, and child in the motley and miraculous clan of Catholic-works like most of Flannery O'Connor's stories and Willa Cather's lean, taut, perfect novel Death Comes for the Archbishop and Andre Dubus' last essays about Eucharist and forgiveness and painful love and all of J. F. Powers' extraordinary stories and Thomas Merton's riveting poem "Original Child Bomb" and Paul Wilkes' modern classic In Mysterious Ways: The Death and Life of a Parish Priest and Annie Dillard's stunning For the Time Being and Alice McDermott's exquisite novel Charming Billy and...



Dead Sea Scrolls

The Library of Congress exhibition of Scrolls From the Dead Sea:  The Ancient Library of Qumran and Modern Scholarship brings before the American people a selection from the scrolls which have been the subject of intense public interest. Over the years questions have been raised about the scrolls' authenticity, about the people who hid them away, about the period in which they lived, about the secrets the scrolls reveal, and about the intentions of the scrolls' custodians in restricting access. The Library's exhibition describes the historical context of the scrolls and the Qumran community from whence they may have originated; it also relates the story of their discovery 2,000 years later. In addition, the exhibition encourages a better understanding of the challenge s and complexities connected with scroll research.

Phyllis Tickle on "The People of the Books"

In the December 2004 issue of Sojourner's Magazine, author and religious-book-publishing guru Phyllis Tickle cites a 50.8 percent growth in book publishing in the last decade. Tickle states that religious publications have dominated the trade in the United States, displaced merely once or twice by children's publishing. Why the sudden jump? Tickle explores the issue in her article, "The People of the Books." Her main premise? Beginning as early as the 1960s and continuing on into the 90's, "Americans’ inquiries about spiritual matters began to take place less and less frequently in pastors’ studies and more and more often in the quiet back corners where most bookstores shelved their religion titles in those days." She writes that such trends have continued to the present day, as with Dan Brown's The Da Vinci Code, which, as she states, "testifies to the lusty good health of religion fiction." For Tickle's full article, please visit the Sojourner's Magazine website, at sojo.net.

Reading with New Eyes

"What if we began to dwell on and savor the words of our worship and prayer as we do when reading poetry?" asks author Nancy M. Malone, in her article about the spirituality of reading. Malone postulates that reading is as spiritual an act as prayer: "In fiction we are involved in a conversation, a complex exchange between the author and ourselves." For Malone, such a complex relationship and conversation mirrors that which we have with God while we pray. She explores this concept and the history of writing and reading in her new book, Walking a Literary Labyrinth: A Spirituality of Reading.

To read Malone's article, "Reading with New Eyes," visit Sojourners.com.

U.S. Catholic Literature

In Una M. Cadegan's article, "U.S. Catholic Literature," she poses questions about how we create literary genres, specifically probing into the genre of Catholic literature. She asks questions like "What is Catholic literature?" and explores what U.S. Catholic writers have written and the ways in which these authors have thought about literature. Cadegan is the associate professor of history and the director of the American Studies Program at the University of Dayton. To read the full article, reprinted with permission, visit faithAlivebooks.