November 2024
Living the Seasons
By Erika Tighe Campbell
A new book from Erica Tighe Campbell, designer and owner of Catholic lifestyle brand Be A Heart, offers an engaging and accessible approach to celebrating Catholic feasts, holy days, and seasons with your family and friends. Focusing on kid-friendly activities, Living the Seasons is packed with crafts, recipes, and reflections that will foster your faith and motivate meaningful family traditions. With colorful photos and easy-to-follow instructions, Campbell’s book also includes a diversity of days to celebrate. Whether you’re new to crafting or a seasoned expert, this guide makes it easy to bring liturgical celebrations to life.
—Sarah Butler Schueller, senior editor, U.S. Catholic
Living the Seasons by Erica Tighe Campbell, owner and designer for Be A Heart, is a stunning, full-color guide to creatively celebrating the faith throughout the year. —Ave Maria Press
Paperback: $34.95
Available at bookstores or from Ave Maria Press at avemariapress.com
October 2024
The Love of Thousands
By Christine Valters Paintner
Angels, saints, and ancestors: For millennia humans have called on these sacred beings for comfort, compassion, and an increased sense of God’s love and presence. In her new book, The Love of Thousands, spiritual writer Christine Valters Paintner offers reflections on how to enter into deeper relationship with these spiritual guides. The book includes historical and scriptural exposition, suggestions for prayer and meditation practices that help cultivate relationships with those beings beyond the earthly realm, ideas for creative practices that nurture relationships with these figures, and blessings to offer in your own spiritual journey.
“When we open our hearts to the blessings of the angels, saints, and our ancestors, we open a river of love,” Paintner writes. From creating a home altar to writing a eulogy to learning a song from your ancestral lands, Paintner offers a variety of practices to foster your relationship with those who came before us—both human and supernatural—and experience this love that in turn connects us to the divine.
—Emily Sanna, managing editor, U.S. Catholic
In The Love of Thousands, Christine Valters Paintner helps us open up our spiritual imagination to encounter our heavenly helpers, allowing us to become everyday mystics. —Ave Maria Press
Paperback: $18.95
Available at bookstores or from Ave Maria Press at avemariapress.com
September 2024
The Art of Living in Season: A Year of Reflections for Everyday Saints
By Sylvie Vanhoozer
Sylvie Vanhoozer grew up in Provence, a town in southern France bathed in lavender fields. Every year at Christmastime, people in Provence display shoebox-sized crèches, or nativity scenes, with colorful clay figurines painted in period dress. These santons, or “little saints” as the figurines are called, each carry a gift for baby Jesus.
These little saints serve as guides for each chapter of The Art of Living in Season. Vanhoozer uses the shepherd, the woman with soup, the drummer, the lavender woman, the farmer, the elders, and others to offer reflections on how to attend to our everyday vocations with hope and love of Christ. Vanhoozer intertwines essays on each liturgical season with her original watercolor paintings of seasonal fruits, herbs, and plants such as juniper leaves, berries, swiss chard, thyme, rosemary, cherry tomatoes, and black-eyed Susans. The longest part of the book is Ordinary Time, showing how the spirit of Christmas can stay with us all year, even during the late summer days. It’s a rich read for any season of the year and full of visual delight.
—Cassidy Klein
“Sylvie Vanhoozer invites readers to join the tradition in the rhythms of nature and the church calendar through weekly reflections and her own botanical illustrations.” —InterVarsity Press
Paperback: $25.00
Available at bookstores or from InterVarsity Press at ivpress.com
August 2024
Looking Up: A Birder’s Guide to Hope Through Grief
By Courtney Ellis
Looking Up: A Birder’s Guide to Hope Through Grief is, obviously, a book about birds: From wrens to quail, vultures to pelicans, Presbyterian pastor Courtney Ellis’ spiritual meditation examines a wide swath of the Earth’s feathered kingdom. Each species of bird serves as a window into an aspect of the human experience—uncertainty, delight, grief, love, and more.
Ellis connects fascinating tales about the lives of these birds to stories from her own life, some joyful, some tragic, but all ultimately oriented toward a sense of hope. In doing so, she suggests that there is not so harsh a dividing line between the “human world” and the “natural world” as we might sometimes imagine. It’s a book about life—of all kinds, avian and human—and a reminder that life finds a way.
—Nathaniel Hunter, associate editor, U.S. Catholic
“In this meditation on birding as a practice of hope, Courtney Ellis weaves together stories from her own life with reflections on birds of many kinds.” —InterVarsity Press
Paperback: $18.00
Available at bookstores or from InterVarsity Press at ivpress.com
July 2024
Women in the New Testament
By Catherine A. Cory with Little Rock Scripture Study staff
Conversations about the New Testament often cast women in small supporting roles, reiterating cultural assumptions about femininity as inferior or even sinful. In Women in the New Testament, theology professor Catherine A. Cory offers a refreshing, accessible, yet scholarly take on these women, inviting us to explore what the Bible actually tells us about Mary the Mother of Jesus, Mary Magdalene, the Samaritan woman, the deacon Phoebe, and more.
In each section, Cory shares intriguing historical tidbits about politics, gender roles, health, narrative style, and political or ideological conflicts. These vignettes provide the reader with context for understanding the stories about these women. The book is structured around six lessons, each of which includes questions for reflection, and short prayers to be used either individually or as part of group study. This is a wonderful resource for educators, ministers, and writers, and the details Cory provides can serve as guideposts for those pursuing more information.
—Rebecca Bratten Weiss, digital editor, U.S. Catholic
“Women in the New Testament delves into the lives of the fascinating women who befriended Jesus, were healed and transformed by him, followed him as disciples, and proclaimed the good news of his resurrection.” —Liturgy Training Publications
Paperback: $17.95
Available at bookstores or from Liturgical Press at (800) 858-5450 or litpress.org
June 2024
Brothers and Sisters
By Florence Morgan Gillman
In liturgical settings, a Catholic encounters Paul’s writing in the lectionary selections of his letters. However, as Florence Morgan Gillman notes in Brothers and Sisters, there is much more to learn about Paul beyond the selections we read and hear at liturgies.
Gillman aims to convey the spirit with which Paul originally wrote these letters. She calls our attention to the shift in the role the letters of Paul play in the liturgy since the Second Vatican Council. The Vatican II document on the sacred liturgy recommends conscious and active participation of the faithful at liturgies. An essential part of this is lectors’ preparation and practice before Mass in order to proclaim the readings as the sacred word of God. Going over the text from Paul’s letters before Mass gives the community an opportunity to hear and grasp Paul’s rhetorical presentation of God’s relationship with the world through Christ.
—Ferdinand Okorie, C.M.F., editor-in-chief, U.S. Catholic
“This excellent resource will enrich appreciation of Paul and offer a sharper lens through which to interpret his words proclaimed in the liturgy.” —Liturgy Training Publications
Paperback: $11.95
Available at bookstores or from Liturgy Training Publications at (800) 933-1800 or ltp.org.
May 2024
The Ball of Red String
By Marlene Halpin, O.P.
Everyone has their own relationship with Jesus, and everyone prays differently. In her book The Ball of Red String, Marlene Halpin guides children through a meditation to help them imagine and develop their own unique relationship with God.
The book, which was originally published in 1999 and released with new illustrations this year, asks children to follow a ball of red string to their “Heart Home.” After reaching this special place, children are asked to picture Jesus—a Jesus who accompanies children in whatever they want to do and talks about whatever they want to talk about. At the back of the book are helpful suggestions for using this meditation in both the classroom and at home, including variations for younger children and shorter versions.
Catholics all too often rely on rote prayers; this book offers a helpful guide to teaching children that they can have a direct relationship with God or Jesus and pray whenever and however works best for them.
—Emily Sanna, managing editor, U.S. Catholic
“The Ball of Red String is a simply but beautifully written guided meditation for children that takes little ones on an imaginative journey to a quiet place where they meet Jesus.” —Loyola Press
Paperback: $14.99
Available at bookstores or from Loyola Press at (800) 621-1008 or loyolapress.com.
April 2024
When God Became White
By Grace Ji-Sun Kim
In When God Became White, Grace Ji-Sun Kim writes from her experience as an “Asian immigrant girl who grew up with a white Jesus.” She traces her own story of painful racist incidents and maps how whiteness shows up in Korean and non-Western churches, a serious consequence of white Western missionaries. Kim helps readers dismantle a white male God in their imagination, offering empowering examples such as minjung theology in Korea, which constructs an East Asian Jesus “who was with the poor, the oppressed, and the outcasts of society.”
Kim points to how contextualizing Christianity in cultures around the world will help Christians move away from whiteness, especially as Christianity grows in the Global South. When God Became White is a valuable read for all Christians committed to anti-oppression and liberation.
—Cassidy Klein, editorial assistant, U.S. Catholic
“This book explores the historical origins and theological implications of how God became cast as a white male. This theology has a devastating effect, enabling Christianity to have a colonialist posture.” —InterVarsity Press
Paperback: $18.00
Available at bookstores or from InterVarsity Press at (800) 848-6224 or ivpress.com.
March 2024
Silencing White Noise
By Willie Dwayne Francois III
In Silencing White Noise, prominent faith leader Willie Dwayne Francois III explores the “white noise” that numbs us to injustice. Using insights from his antiracism curriculum, the Public Love Organizing and Training Project, Francois beckons us to confront silence and inaction with thoughtful solutions. With six powerful practices—what he calls the “rhythms of reparative intercession”—Francois offers practical and empowering steps toward lasting change. A captivating mix of theological discourse, personal narrative, and historical exploration, Silencing White Noise stands out as a crucial and compelling read for people of faith.
—Sarah Butler Schueller, senior editor, U.S. Catholic
“In Silencing White Noise, Willie Dwayne Francois III calls people of all racial backgrounds to take up practices that overcome silence and inaction on race and to advance racial repair.” —Baker Book House
Paperback: $14.95
Available at bookstores or from Baker Book House at (800) 877-2665 or bakerbookhouse.com.
February 2024
Pope Francis on Eucharist
By Pope Francis; Foreward by Cardinal Blase J. Cupich
For the church in the United States, Pope Francis on Eucharist comes at an opportune moments. As the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops continues to organize its National Eucharistic Revival, which often seems to stand in direct competition with the ongoing global Synod on Synodality, this slim book of meditations on the Eucharist suggests a way to bridge the gap.
The short meditations in this book are drawn directly from the preaching and writings of Pope Francis and offer a truly multifaceted view of what Eucharist means. While there are plenty of explicitly theological passages here, Pope Francis on Eucharist is far from catechetical. This is not a book designed for close reading and rigorous study; it serves, rather, as an invitation to be open to the presence of Christ, both on the altar and in our daily lives.
—Nathaniel Hunter, associate editor, U.S. Catholic
“Pope Francis on Eucharist is a collection of writings, homilies, and talks from Pope Francis, sharing a eucharistic vision for the church where all are fed and sustained by the Body of Christ.” —Liturgical Press
Paperback: $14.95
Available at bookstores or from Liturgical Press at (800) 858-5450 or litpress.org.
January 2024
C.S. Lewis in America
By Mark A. Noll
It’s difficult to imagine a Christian literary culture without C.S. Lewis, whose influence cuts across denominational lines. Once, however, Lewis was an exciting newcomer, praised by liberal Catholics and viewed with suspicion by some evangelicals. In C.S. Lewis in America, historian Mark A. Noll discusses early reactions to Lewis’ work from both secular and religious sources in the United States. Noll relates Lewis’ significance to larger cultural challenges, including the need for a robust morality to counter the monstrosity of the Nazis.
The U.S. literary world’s “response to Lewis’s imaginative works showed that gatekeepers for the nation’s public media could celebrate skillful creative writing, even if that writing was chock-full of traditional religious themes,” Noll writes. Lewis’ enduring popularity indicates that this is still true. But it’s refreshing to consider the author in his earlier years, before he’d acquired a fixed position in the canon, and Noll provides a rare opportunity to do so.
—Rebecca Bratten Weiss, digital editor, U.S. Catholic
“Historian Mark A. Noll considers the surprising reception of C.S. Lewis among Roman Catholic, mainline Protestant, and evangelical readers to see how early readings of Lewis shaped his later influence.” —InterVarsity Press
Paperback: $20.00
Available at bookstores or from InterVarsity Press at (800) 848-6224 or ivpress.com.
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The U.S. Catholic Book Club is a collaborative project of U.S. Catholic magazine and the Catholic Book Publishers Association. The titles featured in the U.S. Catholic Book Club are selected each month by the magazine’s editors from submissions by participating book publishers. The publisher provides a paid advertising in U.S. Catholic magazine for the featured book.
