Beth Johnson, reliable guide

Many of you have doubtless heard about the brouhaha about Elizabeth Johnson, Distinguished Professor of Theology at Fordham University, whose book Quest for the Living God was criticized, yea even condemned by the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops' Committee on Doctrine in late March. If you have not heard about the controversy, all the more reason to read the article linked below and links embedded in it.

Prof. Deirdre Good (who blogs at On Not Being a Sausage) and I have written an essay on Prof. Johnson, her theology, and the controversy. The article just came out today (Easter Monday, April 25) at the Episcopal Café. Have a look here (permanent link, will stay up even when article is no longer on the front page) and please feel welcome to leave a comment at the Café below the article.

A brilliant new book: geeks and prayer types please note

A Californian acquaintance of mine by the name of Sistertech has written a truly brilliant, not to mention humorous and touching, book of prayers.

Sistertech transmits her spiritual writings via my friend Pamela Hood, Ph.D., a professor of philosophy in San Francisco, and I recently received a copy of this Book of Uncommon Prayer. Here are a few samples from it.


1.1 Prayers for Morning

1.1.1
May The One in Charge bless us this day, keep us from evil viruses, and bring us stable wireless connectivity. Amen.

1.1.4
Dear One In Charge,
You have brought us in safety to this new day:
Preserve us and our tech devices
with your mighty power,
that we may not fall into sin,
or be overcome by phishing scams, spyware, viruses,
or other adversities;
and in all we do, direct us to the fulfilling of your purpose.
Amen.

1.1.5
A Morning Psalm for Social Media Users
Open my _____ (state name of social media program or website),
O One in Charge,
and my tweets shall proclaim your praise.
Create in me a clean cache
and renew a right spirit of updating within me.
Cast me not away from my Twitter stream,
take not your holy inspiration from me.
Give me the joy of sending tweets again.
Sustain me with bountiful followers
and plenty of content to retweet.
Amen.

1.4 Prayers for Sleep

1.4.1.
O One In Charge,
while our bodies and computers rest
from the labors of the day
and as our RAM, caches, and our souls are released
from the thoughts of this world,
grant that we may stand in your presence
with tranquility, quietness, and peace.
Amen.

1.5 Prayers Before and After Meals

1.5.5.
O One in Charge,
bless this caffeine to our use
and us to thy service.
Amen.

1.5.6
Bless the bunch that munch
this lunch.
Amen.

1.5.7.
O One in Charge, Giver of all good things,
may this food and drink restore our strength,
giving new energy to tired limbs,
and new thoughts to weary minds.
Amen.

2.0 Traditional Prayers (Fran, you will love this one)

2.2. Hail Holy External Drive

Hail, holy two terabyte storage drive,
mother of mercy,
Hail keeper of our life's work,
our sweetest digital files,
and our hope of promotion.

To thee do we cry,
poor banished children of incessant computer crashes;
to these do we send up our sighs,
mourning and weeping
in this valley of infected and corrupted files.

Turn, then, most gracious defender,
thine eyes of mercy toward us;
and after this, our exile,
show unto us the blessed repository of our files:

O clement, O loving, O sweet
terabyte drive.

Pray for us, O perfect external drive,
that we may be made worthy of thy promises of safety.
Amen.

There are prayers to various appropriate saints as well.

There is also a wonderful rendition of the Prayer of Saint Francis, but I will not reproduce it here. You'll have to buy the book!

4.0 The Collects

4.6.2.
For Those Who Offer Technical Support

O One In Charge,
we pray that your grace may always precede and follow
those who offer technical support on their service calls.
May they continually do good work
and not make matters worse.
Amen.

Under 5.4, Ministration to the Sick, there are prayers for sick computers, for the restoration of a hard drive, for computer repair personnel, and so on.

There are also Various & Sundry General Prayers & Thanksgivings including a System Administrator's Prayer for Wellbeing and a prayer For Victims of Gaming Addiction and, of course, For Tech Devices We Love.

I particularly like the Reconciliation of a Penitent, which includes the following:

Penitent:
I confess to The One In Charge,
to geeks everywhere, and to you,
that I have sinned by my own fault
in thought, word, and deed, in things done and left undone;
especially for
__________
__________
__________
__________
___________

(attach digital file if more space is needed.)

For these and all other transgressions which I cannot now remember,
I am truly sorry.
I pray The One In Charge to have mercy on me.
I firmly intend to get a grip,
wake up,
and smell the coffee,
and I humbly beg forgiveness of The One in Charge
and all tech devices,
and I ask you for counsel, direction, and absolution.

Here the witness may offer the penitent counsel, comfort, absolution or a hard time.

Witness:
Chill out.
Everything's copacetic.
The One In Charge has deleted all your sins.

Penitent:
Whew! Thank God!

And just in case one of your machines has a birthday today...

6.11 For a Birthday of a Tech Device
Watch over this device, O One In Charge,
as its days increase;
bless and guide it wherever it may be.
Strengthen it where it is turned on;
comfort it when it receives error messages;
raise it up if it is dropped;
and in its memory
may thy peace which passeth understanding
abide
all the days of its life.
Amen.

And there are, of course, Sistertech's Ten Commandments. Do not drink coffee while reading them. Especially when you read the Sixth Commandment:

"Thou shalt not kill thy laptop by spilling within it half-caf/half-decaf, 2%, extra tall, double mochas or any other fluids."

The Sabbath-keeping and no-adultery commandments are good, too.

The Faith FAQ is terrific.

Now this is a book that "prays well."

The book is on sale at 15% discount till August 15 and it is also available as an e-book in pdf form if you prefer.

I know I've posted two pieces of book p.r. in a row, but it's summer, a good time for reading. You will also need this tech-y prayer book when fall comes along, or long before that if you have anything to do with a computer. Yes, you.

Postcript to the Adorable Godson: Don't you dare buy this: I'm sending you one as a new-tech-job present.

Updating the book list, and a plug for Anita Diamant's new novel

I am digging out from under all manner of things. In the midst of this and the usual house-cleaning, literal and metaphorical, that accompanies the advent of Advent, I am updating this blog. I hadn't updated the reading list at the right in months. It isn't complete, but it gives you a snapshot of what I'm reading or re-reading these days.

The Aquino and Rosado-Nunes book is composed of the proceedings of the first Inter-American Symposium on Feminist Intercultural Theology. This was the first ever formal gathering of Latin American and U.S. Latina feminist theologians. Some social scientists also participated in the meeting. Why is this book significant? Because, one of its introductory essays notes, for the first time in the history of Christianity in the Americas, feminist theologians of the United States, Latin America, and the Caribbean were able to meet together to share our common concerns and visions about the present and the future of our theological work, on the basis of intercultural hermeneutical frameworks. ("Hermeneutical" in this case means "interpretive.")

The book by Renate Wind (which is way overdue at a certain library in California) is a biography, the first, I think, of the late Dorothee Sölle. {This next sentence added a day later after the original post:} Wind has previously written about Dietrich Bonhoeffer; it's not surprising she would be drawn to Sölle, who in so many ways was spiritual and theological heir to Bonhoeffer. The eco-books by McFague and Ruether (the Ruether one is an edited volume featuring writings from Asia, Africa, and Latin America) are triple-purpose books: they are part of my reading and referencing for the Big Tome; I have students reading a couple of them; and I am looking at them as I ponder my sermon for this coming Sunday, the first in Advent. I haven't preached since September. What does the environmental crisis have to do with Advent? You'll find out after I preach. Unless the Holy Spirit sends me in another direction.

I actually cheated by listing Anita Diamant's new book, Day after Night, because I read and finished it last weekend. Anita gave it to me last Friday when she came to my talk on prayer at Harvard (about which more later) and I started reading it that night and finished it on the first of my two plane flights the next day. It's both deep and a page-turner.


I am just starting Louise Erdrich's The Last Report on the Miracles at Little No Horse, which a colleague lent me. "It's about a woman who dresses up as a man so she can work as a Catholic priest, so you can see why it made me think of you," he said. (!) The priest in the book is a member of the Ojibwe Nation, as is Erdrich.

You may or may not have noticed that these are the first fiction books I've listed in eons, or perhaps ever since I started blogging. I am starved for fiction and haven't let myself read any, except for the occasional mystery novel, in something like four years. Ridiculous. Just because I've been trying to finish a work of non-fiction doesn't mean I shouldn't be reading fiction. I find reading fiction life-giving. Do you?

Listen up! Howard Zinn, once again, with a healthy reminder to the citizenry

I quoted Howard Zinn and referred people to his "Election Madness" essay during the presidential campaign till I was blue in the face.

It won't hurt you to re-read that essay. Seriously.

Previous related posts on this blog:here and here and here and here.

Now Zinn has a follow-up for all those of us who are starting to gripe about the President and the new administration. Once you have read the essay to which I refer above, read the follow-up, "Changing Obama's Mindset," which just came out.

Same message: It's up to us. Politicians, even the most exciting of politicians, are still politicians. We're the citizens. We've got to act. End of speech. (Mine. But read his, it's better.)

Both are essays were published, on paper and online, in The Progressive, where Zinn is a columnist.

More on Howard Zinn here. One of my heroes.

By the way, his A People's History of the United States has now been adapted for young people (with Rebecca Stefoff).

Tolle lege. Or if you want the Anglican version of that: Read, mark, learn, and inwardly digest.

Photo by Roslyn Zinn, nicked from the Zinn Education Project.

Love's Trinity

It's always like this: I pop in to say I'm not blogging and then I blog.

I ordered John-Julian, OJN's translation of Julian of Norwich, with commentary by an Associate of the Order of Julian of Norwich named Frederick Roden, and today the book, Love's Trinity, arrived from Liturgical Press. Info and lavish praise here.

For those of you who don't know, OJN is the Order of Julian of Norwich. Yes, we have our very own contemplative order inspired by Julian in the Episcopal Church. Fr. John-Julian founded it in 1985 in Greenwich, Connecticut. Its monastery is now in Waukesha, Wisconsin. Both monks and nuns live there.

On a related note, this week I rejoice in the ordination to the transitional diaconate of my friend Deborah Brown in the Episcopal Diocese of Rochester, New York. She is a former Diocese of North Carolina resident (canonically and otherwise) now living with her beloved up there in the snow belt, where said beloved got a professor job a year ago. Deborah is an Oblate of the Order of Julian of Norwich and as such is committed to a regular practice of silent contemplative prayer as well as daily Morning and Evening Prayer.

I have no time to "read for fun" right now, but I will make time to savor a little bit of Julian every day now that the book has arrived. I am looking forward to this spiritual nourishment and happy that John-Julian, OJN has helped to provide it, and that Dame Julian's words have survived into our day.

At this same time that I saw this sight of the head bleeding, our good Lord
**showed to me a spiritual vision of his simple loving.

I saw that He is to us everything that is good and comfortable for us.

***He is our clothing which for love enwraps us,
*********holds us,
****and all encloses us because of His tender love,
************so that He may never leave us.

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

* *** * * * * * * * * * * He showed a little thing,
****the size of an hazel nut
***in the palm of my hand,
***and it was as round as a ball.

I looked at it with the eye of my understanding and thought:
***"What can this be?"

And it was generally answered thus: "It is all that is made."

I marveled how it could continue,
***because it seemed to me it could suddenly have sunk into nothingness
*******because of its littleness.
And I was answered in my understanding:
****"It continueth and always shall, because God loveth it;
****and in this way everything hath its being by the love of God."
In this little thing I saw three characteristics:
***the first is that God made it,
***the second is that God loves it,
***the third, that God keeps it.
****************************************from Chapter 5

Lost and found

I have been cooking an essay called "Lost Things" which has suddenly started flowing out of my fingers. It may or may not be my next piece for the Episcopal Café, whose editor has been extraordinarily patient with my absence from my contributor duties during this difficult year. I have been musing about the things I have lost or have had stolen from me over the course of my life and about why their absence bothers me. The essay comes straight out of those musings.

In the course of hatching a rough draft, I have remembered once again one of my favorite books from childhood, one which I reread many times as a young adult and which my parents had to give away or leave behind during a major move. I cannot hope to track down that very copy of the book but in these days of the World Wide Web it is possible to find a book that has long been out of print. Every so often I search for it on the internet.

Lo and behold, after two and a half pages of writing I began poking around for the first time in months, and I found not only copies of the book available for sale but confirmation that the book was in fact the one I loved in the form of a picture of the book cover! The first few copies I saw online had either no picture of a cover or a very different picture from the edition I remember. So here is a picture of my beloved book. At some point I will order a copy for myself, or perhaps I will wait till my next trip to France or ask a friend to get it for me. I really want to read the book again but I am just happy it still exists somewhere.


By the way, the book is full of wonderful fables and legends and tales: how certain streets in Paris got their name, what a fortune-teller said to one of the Medici queens (two Medici women married French kings), who built what when, and how the city got its start. That part is not fable but historical fact. It is through this book that I learned about the Parisii, the tribe that gave Paris its name. Paris was a city of boat people, clustered on a few islands that were later consolidated into the two islands we know at the heart of the city. The Romans, of course, took over the islands when they conquered Gaul, did a lot of building, and named the city Lutetia (Lutèce in French), though some sources say that the city's name was already Lutetia by the time the Romans conquered it in 52 BCE. Bits of Roman amphitheatre and baths survive, but the Parisii came first and it is their name that endures.

The book is also chock-full of stories of the saints, and I still remember them: Denis, martyred (on what became known as Mons Martyrium, later abridged to Montmartre) and carrying his head in his hands all the way to what is now the town of St. Denis, where a basilica commemorates him; Geneviève the shepherd girl, praying away the Huns; and others, but those two especially.

Interesting how stories pour out of us when we are ready, or sometimes long after we were ready. I should have known by the grumpy mood of the last few days that I was cooking several pieces of writing. Reports and other mundane word processing stood at the doorway and blocked them. I must get back to those duty-bound words, but now I know what was ready to come forth, and there will be no stopping it.

+Rembert Weakland's memoir due out in late May

Rembert Weakland, O.S.B., retired Catholic Archbishop of Milwaukee, has a memoir coming out later this month.

I am glad he has written it. He is a good man. I was distressed at the way his former relationship got compared to the cases of abuse that were happening at the same time; he's no child abuser. He did something stupid, but that's not the same thing as being an abuser.

The Catholic Herald, Milwaukee's diocesan newspaper, has a context-setting article about the book.

Rembert and I met in the 1980s* and I consider him my friend. There is already media buzz about the book and there will be more. Let's read the book before making up our minds.

*In the context of work on the Catholic bishop's pastoral letter on economic justice.


A 7 p.m. postscript: It turns out there was an article in the NY Times today here.

Spirit, Structure, and Flesh: my friend Deidre Crumbley's new book

I am just back from the book party for my friend Deidre's new book, held at St. Ambrose, Raleigh, a historically African American Episcopal church. The publisher (a university press) priced the book high and it's a hardback, but I am happy to say that Deidre's friends showed up and bought a lot of books -- and the founder of the church's Jazz Mass Quartet came and played the saxophone! There was food, particularly some excellent spinach balls. And a big cake saying "Congratulations." Here's a reproduction of the book cover.


It's a fascinating book and Dr. Crumbley (that's Deidre) has worked on it for something like 20 years. Four years of field work in Nigeria, countless rewrites, and the search for a publisher, plus illness and search for funding and all manner of obstacles. I gather there was also a cat involved at some point. Of course.

Rejoice with Deidre in her great achievement!

By the way, there are now members of African Initiated Churches, including the Aladura churches in this book, here in the U.S. -- including here in North Carolina. As Deidre noted in her short talk at the party, the African Diaspora did not end with slavery; indeed, our President-Elect is a child of this diaspora. So the African Initiated Churches, which began in the 20th century as indigenous African forms of Christianity, have migrated to other continents and are undergoing changes there.

More on the book on the publisher's website here. The full name of the book is Spirit, Structure, And Flesh: Gendered Experiences in African Instituted Churches among the Yoruba of Nigeria.

Toni Morrison's new book: A Mercy

A good book for Thanksgiving. I won't have money to buy it or time to read it till heaven knows when, but I really want to. The New York Times Book Review for this weekend has a front-page essay about it.

... In “A Mercy,” a 17th-­century American farmer — who lives near a town wink-and-nudgingly called Milton — enriches himself by dabbling in the rum trade and builds an ostentatious, oversize new house, for which he orders up a fancy wrought-iron gate, ornamented with twin copper serpents: when the gate is closed, their heads meet to form a blossom. The farmer, Jacob Vaark, thinks he’s creating an earthly paradise, but Lina, his Native American slave, whose forced exposure to Presbyterianism has conveniently provided her with a Judeo-­Christian metaphor, feels as if she’s “entering the world of the damned.”

In this American Eden, you get two original sins for the price of one — the near extermination of the native population and the importation of slaves from Africa — and it’s not hard to spot the real serpents: those creatures Lina calls “Europes,” men whose “whitened” skins make them appear on first sight to be “ill or dead,” and whose great gifts to the heathens seem to be smallpox and a harsh version of Christianity with “a dull, unimaginative god.” Jacob is as close as we get to a benevolent European. Although three bondswomen (one Native American, one African and one “a bit mongrelized”) help run his farm, he refuses to traffic in slaves; the mother of the African girl, in fact, has forced her daughter on him because the girl is in danger of falling into worse hands and he seems “human.” Yet Jacob’s money is no less tainted than if he’d wielded a whip himself: it simply comes from slaves he doesn’t have to see in person, working sugar plantations in the Caribbean. And the preposterous house he builds with this money comes to no good. It costs the lives of 50 trees (cut down, as Lina notes, “without asking their permission”), his own daughter dies in an accident during the construction, and he never lives to finish it.

True, some of the white settlers are escapees from hell: Jacob’s wife, Rebekka, whom he imported sight unseen from London, retains too-vivid memories of public hangings and drawings-and-quarterings. ...

... This novel isn’t a polemic — does anybody really need to be persuaded that exploitation is evil? — but a tragedy in which “to be given dominion over another is a hard thing; to wrest dominion over another is a wrong thing; to give dominion of yourself to another is a wicked thing.”

Except for a slimy Portuguese slave trader, no character in the novel is wholly evil, and even he’s more weak and contemptible than mustache-twirlingly villainous. Nor are the characters we root for particularly saintly. While Lina laments the nonconsensual deaths of trees, she deftly drowns a newborn baby, not, as in “Beloved,” to save it from a life of slavery, but simply because she thinks the child’s mother (the “mongrelized” girl who goes by the Morrisonian name of Sorrow) has already brought enough bum luck to Jacob’s farmstead. Everyone in “A Mercy” is damaged; a few, once in a while, find strength to act out of love, or at least out of mercy — that is, when those who have the power to do harm decide not to exercise it. A negative virtue, but perhaps more lasting than love. ...

Read the rest here.

Essay: David Gates.
Photo: Damon Winter, The New York Times.

Friday critter blogging: about that hypoallergenic puppy

The Washington Post has this to say on the matter of non-allergifying dogs.

Enough with the hybrid doggiedoodles and hairless dogs. I want to know why nobody has followed the lead of Doxy and Ted Kennedy and Vickie Reggie Kennedy and gone for the Portuguese Water Dog. Aren't they non-allergifying? Can't you see a nice Portuguese Water Dog in the White House?


More of Doxy's Dog here and here, a year later. As for Senator Ted's and Ms. Victoria's dogs, one of them is a book writer.

On the cat front, Her Grace Maya Pavlova has rediscovered her catnip mouse, which had lain in its basket of toys for weeks and weeks. She grabbed it yesterday and chased it halfway around the house. Go figure. +Maya was in a frisky, playful mood. A visitor and I speculated yesterday evening that it could have been the scent of the visitor's dog (who did not come to visit), a male pug by the name of Kevin (not to be confused with my friend Kevin's dog, whose name is Andy) -- or maybe it was the full moon.

(Note: I am allergic to some animals and not others. Miss +Maya is a mutt cat, but non-allergifying, to me anyway, whereas I had to return not one but two other cat mutts to the shelter a few days after taking them in, the year before she came to live with me, because they gave me serious asthma. It's a dander thing.)

And in case the Obamas are worried about allergies, really and truly, Doxy said the Portuguese Water Dog was non-allergifying, and if they don't believe Doxy, they can take Senator Ted's word. Have a look at this man-loves-his-dog story and interview. (Read it till the end for cute trivia about an episode with Biden and Wellstone - and the dog. There's also an audio of a piece of the dog's book.) And here's the picture from the article.

This blog post has been approved by +Maya Pavlova, Feline Bishop Extraordinaire. Acts of Hope is a multi-species-friendly blog, in full communion with dog-loving blogs.

It's here!

Thanks to a staff person who will remain nameless, a copy of the brand spankin' new edition of the paperback of When in Doubt, Sing made its way by overnight UPS to the door of my house, where I went and fetched it after lunch and between worky engagements. Good thing I live near my place of employ. The book is beautiful and I love holding it in my hot little hands.

I presented it to Miss Maya Pavlova as soon as I took it out of the wrapping and placed it on the floor. She showed no interest because she was showing me her belly, which she does whenever I walk in the door. (Drop to floor, roll on back, show off fuzzy tummy, roll around on back for a while.) Then she came up to it and sniffed it (it smells brand new and definitely not like cat food), placed two paws on it in blessing, and returned to her feline pursuits.

I took a couple of photos of her with the book later on but she was really not interested in posing, because she was washing her paws, and in the land of cats, this takes precedence over literature. Cats already have great literature in their heads.

But I think Her Grace, the Feline Bishop Extraordinaire, will allow herself to be photographed again with a different attitude toward the book. Give her a little time. For now, I am back at the office after a Division Meeting (that's the Humanities Division, of which the Religious Studies Department is a member) at which we discussed the current humongous budget cuts at the college. Not cheery. I am teaching tonight, but not till 8 p.m., so it's possible I will go home for a bit of chicken soup (a new batch). +Maya Pavlova will be interested in that.

Making a book, cont'd (and Chicago party reminder)

Lest you think all we do here is self-promotion, let me note that we also promote our family and our friends. And our favorite presidential candidate. All in one day, in this case.

We are, however, back in the land of shameless self-promotion -- or rather, book promotion.

When we last checked in with the new paperback edition of When in Doubt, Sing (a.k.a. WIDS), we got a look at the inside of the book, i.e. the printed pages. Now we get a look at the cover. And at the whole book, though it is still in process. Click on photos to enlarge and see detail.

The press is in Indiana, as are the publishing offices. Ave Maria Press (under whose imprint, Sorin Books, WIDS is being published) has its roots in the Ave Maria magazine, begun by the same Holy Cross priest, Edward Sorin, who founded the University of Notre Dame. Sorin, in an unusual move for his day, handed over the reins to Sister Angela Gilespie, a nurse veteran of the Civil War, who ran the magazine for many years.

This is binderyman Mike Doll.

Bonus photo (with Mike in the background) for people who like machines and mechanical things.

Tom the Publisher writes:

It's a real book! At least we have a few samples. By the end of the day the whole run should be complete. The first step is to fill (and refill) the pockets with the 15 32-page signatures [note from Jane: a signature is a stack of pages] of the book. (It's a big book!) Then the signatures are gathered together and wrapped in the cover. Heat is applied to secure the glue. Then the book blocks are stacked on pallets awaiting the final step, which is to trim the excess from three sides of the book.

This is Amanda Williams, otherwise known as Publicist of Acts of Hope and Amanda the Publicist. She visits this blog now and again, and she is organizing the Chicago book party. See below on this post for info on the party.

Great photo of Amanda the Publicist with WIDS.

Where, oh where, is a photo of Publisher of Acts of Hope? Once again, thanks to Ave Maria Press Publisher and President Tom Grady, who is modestly hiding off-camera, but who is bringing you this series of pictures, and the book.

When in Doubt, Sing: Prayer in Daily Life

by Jane Redmont

Coming November 1, All Saints' Day!

As previously noted on this blog, there are contact people for sales, promotion and author appearances. See here.

Reminder: There will be a book party at the American Academy of Religion Annual Meeting in Chicago, next Sunday night. That's November 3. Contact us if you live in Chicagoland or are planning to be in town for the AAR and you want to come. It's a wine and cheese sort of thing. With books, of course, and yours truly, and Amanda the Publicist (Tom the Publisher has a family commitment and cannot be there) and friends from hither and yon.

Contact Amanda Williams, Publicist at 800-282-1865 x206 or Awilli21 at nd dot edu.

You can also write me at widsauthor at earthlink dot net.

Yes, there will be a party in Greensboro, later in the fall or early winter, and probably something in Boston, too. Any excuse for a party is good.

The book is up on Amazon.com (with a discount!), but you can also support your local independent bookstore and order it from there.

I hope the book is helpful to you. I wrote it to help people to pray. I welcome your feedback. And yes, I do travel and give talks and facilitate retreats.

Here endeth the promotion message.

Photos: Ave Maria Press. Click on photos to enlarge.

Making a book

My very nice publisher, Tom Grady, sent me some photos yesterday. This is the new edition of When in Doubt, Sing in production.

Tom writes: "The sheets have all been printed, and now it's being folded and gathered in preparation for the binding either later this week or early next."

Isn't this fun? I don't know the name of the bearded printer, but he's in Indiana and that really is my book. Enjoy.

(Friday: Now I do, thanks to Amanda the Publicist: His name is Robbie Thomas and he's the binderyman.)


Coincidentally, just yesterday, in one of my classes on Christianity in the 16th century, I was telling my students about the relationship among the advent of the printing press, Christian humanism, and the Reformation.

I love books. Always have. One of my favorite books as a child was a French novel called La Petite Plantin, about the daughter of a printer named Christophe Plantin (a real historical person) who lived and worked in the Low Countries (Antwerp, if I remember correctly -- Anvers in French, a city in what is now Belgium) after the invention of the printing press and during the rise of the Reformation. I loved it because it had a strong female heroine, printing presses, language, and even a love story, though that was not the central thread of the biography. What is interesting is that the big project in the story is a multilingual (polyglot) Bible and that at the time I read the story I had no idea that I would become an active Christian, much less a preacher, nor that I would be teaching Christian history and theology. I just loved the book. I still think of it. I don't know where my copy is. When my parents moved from France back to the U.S. they couldn't move all my old books and many of my childhood books stayed in Europe. They gave some to friends and family so it's possible my goddaughter's family have some of them. Perhaps some day I'll find and read that book again.

I also love printing presses -- and old-fashioned teletype machines. My father was a journalist when I was growing up and I remember visiting his office when I was young and he was working for a news agency. It had a newsroom in the old style, wide open with everyone working in one space, and you could hear the clatter of typewriters and of the teletype. To this day I find those sounds both comforting and exciting. I also used to fall asleep to the sound of my father's typewriter in the next room. To me, this is one of the sounds of home. The typewriters are in storage (I don't think either my father or I can bear to let go of our typewriters even though we no longer use them) and both of us --and my mother and brother too-- have computers with near-silent keyboards, but the sound of the typewriter is like a heartbeat to me.

The sound of my mother's heartbeat, the sound of my father's typewriter. Yes, I am one of those people with ink in their veins.

Photos: Ave Maria Press. Click on photos to enlarge.

Our Prayer, Not My Prayer (a WIDS excerpt)

As promised and somewhat belatedly, a bit of spiritual nourishment. Chew on it and see whether it feeds you.


An excerpt from the beginning of Chapter 15 of When in Doubt, Sing: Prayer in Daily Life by Jane Redmont (Sorin Books, 2008).

“I am,” the African proverb says, “because we are.” One cannot be a Christian away in a corner. Even hermits pray as members of the universal church. We are always linked in prayer with those who share our faith and our tradition, across geography and through history. We speak their words. We speak their names. We draw from their strength.

“How can I find God?” The question came to Jim Martin, a young Jesuit writer and editor, from a close friend who had “lost touch with her church. Like many contemporary Americans, while she viewed herself as ‘nonreligious,’ she admired friends who lived lives of faith, and desired that faith for herself. Still, she was essentially a skeptical woman---intelligent and well-educated---living in a secular culture…. I did the best I could, and then decided to ask other people of faith what they might tell my friend.” Like many of the people Jim Martin consulted, and whose answers he later published, I offered the caution that it is more naturally God who finds us. Remembering Jesus’ invitation, “Come and see” to the would-be disciples, I also offered a pragmatic approach. Don’t think too much about finding God: do something, and the finding will follow. Do it on two levels. Find what speaks to your deepest heart. Go to that intimate place where you are infinitely sad, or ecstatic, or creative and talented, or bereft, or deeply engaged, and there you will find God, if you enter into that place and ask what it means for you and for the rest of the world that you are there. The other level may be even more important because you have asked, “How can I find God?” To “find God,” I suggested, “go find yourself a ‘we’.” I would have answered in much the same way if she had asked: “How can I learn to pray?”

Go find yourself a “we,” I insisted. A community, any community. A Christian community, if the path into which you were born or are drawn is Christian; a Jewish one, if you are a Jew by birth or by choice; a Muslim one if that is your path. I would say the same of the great religious paths that do not have a “God,” such as Buddhism---where one “takes refuge in the Buddha, the dharma (Buddhist teaching and practice), and the sangha (the community).” Find yourself a community of practice and of faith---one that meets your standards of intellectual honesty, lack of hypocrisy, sincere concern for others, non-coercive welcome of the stranger. If the community is Christian, the “we” might be a parish, where worship may be noisy or quiet, structured or chaotic. The “we” might well also be a prayer group---contemplative, charismatic, or other---or a Bible study group, a women’s liturgical gathering, a Catholic Worker community, a team that cares and prays for people with AIDS, or an adult education class with some soul and some teeth. You may have to look around, and you may have to try a few different communities, I wrote Jim’s friend. Given them a chance. “Come and see.” Then stay for a while. See what happens.

I know. Groups are difficult. Common life is messy. Institutional religion may have wounded you, I wrote---hence my listing of several forms of community, in the hope that one might serve as a gateway into the common life that is faith. God alone can answer the lonely yearning inside that heart of yours which is like no other heart. But God without the “we” experience is not the God of whom the Jewish and Christian Scriptures speak, nor the God whose message the Prophet Mohammed carried to the people who became followers of the path of Islam. God---“I will be who I will be”---is involved in history, in our history. In this history, we meet companions. In their friendship, we find God, and God finds us.

(c) Jane Redmont, 1999, 2008