Carl E. Olson's Blog, page 25

Top posts! Top sellers! An Ignatius Press Novels Review of 2015

2015 is almost over, and it’s time to look back over the past year in novels and in posts here at the Novel Thoughts blog. First off, here’s a list of the top-selling novels from the year:

Elijah in Jerusalem : The long-awaited sequel to Father Elijah takes the top spot this year.
Joan of Arc : The classic novel by Mark Twain remains a favorite among our readers.
Father Elijah : The first novel by Michael O’Brien remains in the top ten!
Dear and Glorious Physician : Taylor Caldwell’s novel on the life of Saint Luke.
Ida Elisabeth : Sigrid Undset’s insightful novel saw a boost in sales this year.
Island of the World : Michael O’Brien’s epic novel set in the Balkans.
Tobit’s Dog : Michael N. Richards’ retelling of the Book of Tobit, set in the Depression-era south.
Song of Bernadette : Franz Werfel’s classic novel was the basis of the famous film.
The Spear : Louis de Wohl’s novel about Saint Longinus.
We’ll Never Tell Them : The latest novel by Fiorella De Maria is a must-read!

In the Ignatius Critical Editions, which feature classic works of literature along with insightful essays, the top-selling five novels were:

Continue reading at IPNovels.com.

Christmas and a World Upside-down

"La Nativite a la Torche" (Nativity with the Torch) by Le Nain brothers (early 1600s; WikiArt.org)

Christmas and a World Upside-down | George Weigel | CWR

The child “wrapped…in swaddling clothes and laid….in a manger” will not establish God’s rule and kingdom by political cunning, or by a display of worldly wisdom, or by knocking emperors and procurators off their thrones or judgment-seats

Biblical scholars generally agree that Luke’s Gospel was written at least a generation later than Paul’s first letter to the Christians at Corinth. Yet whatever the dating, and irrespective of scholarly disputes about whether “Luke,” the author of the eponymous Gospel and the Acts of the Apostles, and “Luke,” the companion of Paul mentioned in Acts and several Pauline letters, are the same person, First Corinthians and Luke-Acts are built on the same, deep theological insight: the incarnation of the Son of God, and his birth, ministry, death, and resurrection, turned the world upside-down.

So even if the Christmas story of the angelic announcement of the Nativity to the shepherds of Bethlehem (Luke 2.1-20) was written decades later than First Corinthians, Paul’s letter to those fractious Greeks give us a crucial interpretive key to Christmas.

Here is Paul, bringing some serious heat at the very beginning of letter full of challenge to his converts in one of antiquity’s rowdiest towns:

Continue reading on the CWR site.

The 15 Most Popular CWR Stories of 2015

Carl E. Olson | The Dispatch at CWR

Articles and commentary about Pope Francis, radical Islam, the Shroud of Turin, France, President Obama, the devil, "50 Shades of Grey", and much more

For the third year in a row the most read article on the CWR site was about radical Islamic attacks on innocents. In 2013 it was the account by nuns in Syria about the violence and bloodshed that was becoming increasingly commonplace in that war-torn country. In 2014 it was the story of slain journalist James Foley, who was killed in, yes, Syria. This year it is the story of Pope Francis' response to the beheading of 21 Egyptian Christians by members of ISIS.

Four of the top 15 articles (#1, 6, 7, and 15) were about the Holy Father, while President Obama featured in two others (#4 and 12). Other top topics include The Shroud of Turin (#2), Catholicism in Francis (#3), Cinderella (#13), the terrorist attack in San Bernardino (#11), and liberal theologians (#9). The devil gets two mentions, both times in pieces about spiritual warfare (#5 and 14).

Here are Catholic World Report's 15 most read articles of 2015:

1. “Their blood confesses Christ”: Pope Francis on the murder of Egyptian Christians by ISIS (February 16) by Catherine Harmon. Pope Francis responds to the news that 21 Egyptian Christians were beheaded by Islamic State militants.

2. The Shroud: Not a Painting, Not a Scorch, Not a Photograph (March 27) by Jim Graves. “One of my favorite testimonials as to the authenticity of the Shroud,” says Barrie Schwortz, an expert on the Shroud of Turin, “actually came from my Jewish mother.” 

3. France’s Catholic Revolution (November 23) by Dr. Samuel Gregg. While Mass-attendance rates have steeply declined over the last 30 years, today France is witnessing the rise of an increasingly self-confident—and dynamically orthodox—Catholicism. 

Continue reading at www.CatholicWorldReport.com.

The Reality of Myth and the Force of Star Wars

The Reality of Myth and the Force of Star Wars | Dr. Christopher S. Morrissey | CWR

The deepest lesson of myth cannot be that good and evil are morally and metaphysically equivalent but that peace and justice are realized in the bringing of good out of evil

If I told you that Star Wars: The Force Awakens is the best Star Wars movie ever made, you wouldn’t want to believe me. The original trilogy of films, the first two especially, have become so sacrosanct in the memory of many, nothing could ever rival their definitive status.

But the new Star Wars film from J.J. Abrams is a beautiful achievement, and not just because it returns the saga to perfectly paced, fast-moving fun, propelled by plenty of humor. In a deeper way, it explores the mythology of Star Wars by asking us to consider the meaning of our memories of the original films.

As Fr. Robert J. Spitzer argues in his new book, The Soul’s Upward Yearning: Clues to Our Transcendent Nature from Experience and Reason (Ignatius Press, 2015), Star Wars is technically a myth. Myths, due to the way they address the transcendent nature of human beings, are a unique form of story-telling.

“Though a myth is fictional, it is not fiction,” writes Spitzer. “The objective of myths is to express ultimate truth and meaning … and reveal the source of truth and meaning—that is, ultimate reality. Not only this, but myths must also reveal how and why ultimate reality connects with this world—and the people within it.”

As its title might suggest, The Force Awakens lays claim to definitively showing us how the Force works. It does so by taking the filmmakers’ biggest disadvantage — the fact that Episode VII comes after the hallowed originals — and using this to its advantage.

Thanks to its conscious repetition of the immortal story elements from the best Star Wars movies — a close family member has gone over to the Dark Side, and a planet-destroying technological threat must be resisted by rebel underdogs — we are invited to consider more deeply how the Force actually works in the cycles of history.

If every generation has to contend with an adjacent-generation family member going over to the Dark Side, and if every generation has to defeat an existential threat of Death Star-sized proportions, then either nothing is new under the sun (on Jakku or Tatooine), or else the Force is somehow perpetually able to awaken that which is new and beautiful and good.

People may criticize this new movie on the grounds that it has far too little that is new. The easiest critical remark to make is that it recycles too many beloved plot elements from the first two Star Wars movies. It is a blatantly overindulgent, hugely expensive exercise in nostalgia, they may say, trying to relive what can never be relived. Its repeated acts of homage to the originals overwhelm whatever initially promising innovations it may offer. It is finally crushed beneath the burden of everyone’s impossible expectations. Or so they may say.

If so, then I believe they are missing the point.

Continue reading on the CWR site.

The Virgin Mary bore the King and the Kingdom, the Messiah and the Church

"Nativity" (c. 1311) by Giotto di Bondone [WikiArt.org]

A Scriptural Reflection on the Readings for December 20, 2015, the Fourth Sunday of Advent | Carl E. Olson

Readings:
• Mi 5:1-4a
• Ps 80:2-3, 15-16, 18-19
• Heb 10:5-10
• Lk 1:39-45

St. Augustine, in his treatise, “On Holy Virginity,” made this profound, even startling, statement: “Thus also her nearness as a Mother would have been of no profit to Mary, had she not borne Christ in her heart after a more blessed manner than in her flesh.”

In that single line, the great Doctor anticipated the objections voiced by many Protestants while also explaining the honor and love shown by Catholics (and Eastern Orthodox) for the Theotokos, the Mother of God. I heard and repeated, while growing up in a Protestant home of Fundamentalist persuasion, many of those objections: “Mary was just an ordinary woman,” “Mary was not sinless,” and, of course, “Catholics worship Mary!” People would sometimes go to extremes to avoid any appearance of praise for Mary. A close relative once told me that Mary had merely been a “biological vessel” for the baby Jesus!

Two things changed my mind: reading actual Catholic teaching about Mary and re-reading Scripture. The first came from a sense of fairness toward what I didn’t know; the second came from a growing (and hardly characteristic) humility about what I thought I knew. Sure, I had read the opening chapters of the Gospel of Luke many times. But I must have read it dozens of times before I began to slowly comprehend the astonishment of the Annunciation, the wonder of Elizabeth’s ecstatic greeting, the magnitude of the Magnificat.

Today’s Gospel reading follows the Annunciation and immediately precedes the Canticle of Mary. The young Mary, told by Gabriel that she had found favor with God and would bear a son, eventually sets out to see Elizabeth, also pregnant with a son. Having already been confirmed by a heavenly messenger of God, Mary was then confirmed by her own flesh and blood in words heard and repeated by countless faithful through the centuries: “Blessed are you among women and blessed is the fruit of your womb.”

To be blessed is to have found favor with God, to be filled with the grace—the supernatural life—of God. It is to possess the kingdom by belonging to the King (cf. Matt 5:3, 10). As mother of the King of kings, Mary bore the kingdom within her. As mother of the Messiah, she is also the mother of the Church. Pope John Paul II, in Redemptoris Mater (1987), wrote that “in her new motherhood in the Spirit, Mary embraces each and every one in the Church, and embraces each and every one through the Church” (par. 47).

Mary and Elizabeth, bearing their sons—one a prophet, the other the Son of God—prefigure the Church that would later be born from the side of the crucified Lord and made manifest on Pentecost (see CCC 766, 1076). Blessed by the Father, impregnated by the power of the Holy Spirit, and filled with the Son, the Virgin brings joy and gladness into the dark, silent womb of man’s deepest longing.

Like St. Augustine, John Paul II provided a profound reflection on the belief and faith of Mary. In the expression “Blessed are you who believed,” he wrote, “we can therefore rightly find a kind of ‘key’ which unlocks for us the innermost reality of Mary, whom the angel hailed as ‘full of grace.’ If as ‘full of grace’ she has been eternally present in the mystery of Christ, through faith she became a sharer in that mystery in every extension of her earthly journey” (par. 19). The miracle of Mary’s pregnancy and Virgin birth go hand in hand with the mystery of faith.

At Christmas we celebrate the birth of the Christ child while recognizing that Christ always remains in the heart of Mary. Having given birth to the Savior at one particular moment in time, Mary has continued to give the Savior to the world ever since. It is her one desire, her unending gift of joy and life to each of us. “And how does this happen to me,” we ask ourselves, “that the mother of my Lord should come to me?”

(This "Opening the Word" column originally appeared in the December 20, 2009, edition of Our Sunday Visitor newspaper.)

New: "Pope Francis: On the Family"

On the Family

by Pope Francis

"The true joy which we experience in the family is not superficial; it does not come from material objects, from the fact that everything seems to be going well. . . . True joy comes from a profound harmony between persons, something which we all feel in our hearts."
— Pope Francis

Now available for the first time in print, the entire collection of Pope Francis' weekly Wednesday audience talks on the family from Dec. 17, 2014 to Sept. 16, 2015! 

These talks cover a wide variety of important subjects directly related to family life. Underscoring his deep love and concern for the family, Pope Francis speaks with his usual personal warmth and humility, offering wisdom and practical insights for the modern family.

Pope Francis has often expressed his concern for the urgent pastoral needs of families in today's society. Underscoring that deep love and concern for the family, the Pope has spent many months speaking on this subject in his weekly Wednesday audience talks. This book is a collection of all of those talks about the family from Dec. 17, 2014 to Sept. 16, 2015.

The Pope covers a wide variety of important subjects directly related to family life, speaking in his personal style that offers wisdom and practical insights for the modern family. His words are for families in general, and also directed to the important roles of all those specific persons who make up family life – husbands, wives, parents, children and grandparents. He emphasizes the deep crisis that the family and marriage are undergoing in the Western world, and says that the family is "a new mission field for the Church." He challenges families today to be witnesses to the world of love, fidelity, and service.

Some of the specific topics his talks address include: the example of the Holy Family of Nazareth; transmitting the faith; educating the children; family prayer; complementarity of male and female; celebration in family life; mercy and forgiveness; dealing with illness and death; learning the value of work; poverty and economic struggles; evangelizing the culture, and much more.

Throughout his addresses, the Holy Father especially emphasizes the primary role of God and faith in family life, and the crucial importance of regular family prayer to draw on God's grace for strength, love, joy and unity within the home.

Pope Francis (Jorge Mario Bergoglio), is the first Jesuit and the first Latin American to be elected to the chair of Peter. A native of Buenos Aires, Argentina, he was ordained as a priest in 1969. He served as head of the Society of Jesus in Argentina from 1973 to 1979. In 1998 he became the archbishop of Buenos Aires and, in 2001, a cardinal. Following the resigna­tion of his predecessor, Pope Benedict XVI, on February 28, 2013, the conclave elected Bergoglio, who chose the papal name Francis in honor of Saint Francis of Assisi.

Order now at www.Ignatius.com*

*Please note that this book will not arrive in time for Christmas if you do not select expedited shipping.

A Deeper Vision: Catholicism and the Past Century

A Deeper Vision: Catholicism and the Past Century | Robert Royal | CWR

Most people – even most Catholics – don’t realize it, but the twentieth century, or at least the first two-thirds of it, were a kind of golden age for Catholic intellectual and cultural life.

In the summer of 1901, Jacques Maritain (who would go on to become the most influential Catholic philosopher of the twentieth century) and his future wife Raïssa Oumançoff (a Jewish refugee from Russia, later a notable mystic and poet) were walking together in the Jardin des Plantes in Paris. They were both studying science at the Sorbonne, and the scientific vision of materialism then dominant seemed so cold and superficial to them that they decided, if they couldn’t find something better and deeper to live for, to die together by committing suicide. In short order, they both discovered Catholicism, and the rest is history.

Many people, great and small, over the last 100 years and more have found in Catholicism an answer to life-or-death questions. By the second half of the twentieth century, it even became a kind of joke. Muriel Spark (another convert) describes a desperate character in her 1963 novel The Girls of Slender Means who could “never make up his mind between suicide and an equally drastic course of action known as Father D’Arcy.” (Father Martin D’Arcy S. J. was a real-life priest at Farm Street Church in London who had guided Evelyn Waugh, and many other prominent English men and women into the Church.) Spark even claimed that it was not until she became a Catholic that she could see life whole and, therefore, could be a novelist.

Catholicism, of course, must be a faith for all God’s people, the ordinary and humble, as well the gifted and prominent. It cannot solely be a faith for philosophers, theologians, scripture scholars, historians, or obvious saints. Some people have consequently come to believe that all this intellectual ferment, the interplay of faith and reason that has always been a unique feature of Catholicity, is really unnecessary. As if, like evangelicals, all we need is our “personal relationship with Jesus.” That relationship is, of course, crucial. And it’s a good principle, even found in the early pages of Aquinas’ Summa theologiae, that few people have the gifts, time, or inclination to do serious theology or philosophy. It’s enough if those to whom God has given the responsibility are capable of doing it.

But we should also keep in mind a certain image. Pope Francis has said, with great resonance around the world, that the Church is a kind of “field hospital.” The world is always pretty much a bloody mess in which one of the first tasks is just to stanch the bleeding and keep people from perishing. This is helpful if it’s rightly understood, harmful wrongly understood. As the pope has said on other occasions, there’s a kind of buonismo – roughly “goody-goodyism” – sometimes among Catholics, who pretend that everything is fine when we’ve just covered up, not really treated, wounds. We might take this a step further: without deep and steady Catholic knowledge, we may become like a doctor with a good bedside manner, but who doesn’t have technical medical knowledge. When you’re sick in bed, he can hold your hand and speak comforting words, but, if he doesn’t also know real medicine, can’t really cure what ails you.

Most people – even most Catholics – don’t realize it, but the twentieth century, or at least the first two-thirds of it, were a kind of golden age for Catholic intellectual and cultural life. In philosophy, theology, scripture studies, culture, literature, and music, Catholics produced some of the most remarkable work across a wide variety of fields as they have in virtually any age in the two millennia of the Church’s existence. That now forgotten fertility is the subject of my most recent book: A Deeper Vision: The Catholic Intellectual Tradition in the Twentieth Century, just published by Ignatius Press.

The title, slightly reworked for the publisher’s purposes, is drawn from the concluding lines of Gerard Manley Hopkins’ great sonnet “God’s Grandeur”:

Continue reading at www.CatholicWorldReport.com.

The Spiritual Master Pope Francis Wants You to Read

(us.fotolia.com | liberowolf)

The Spiritual Master Pope Francis Wants You to Read | Bishop Robert Barron

I first read Dante's masterpiece, The Divine Comedy, twenty-five years ago—and the experience changed my life

This year marks the 750th anniversary of the birth of the great Catholic poet Dante Alighieri. Michelangelo reverenced Dante, as did Longfellow, Dorothy Sayers, and T.S. Eliot. In fact, it was Eliot who commented, "Dante and Shakespeare divide the world between them. There is no third." One of Bob Dylan's finest songs, "Tangled Up in Blue," contains a reference to Dante: "She opened up a book of poems, handed it to me/ It was written by an Italian poet from the 13th century/ And every one of those words rang true and glowed like burning coal/ Pouring off of every page like it was written in my soul."

I first read Dante's masterpiece, The Divine Comedy, in the summer of 1990, when I was studying German in Freiburg in Breisgau. The experience changed my life. Almost every book I've written contains some reference to the poet, and I've used him extensively in my preaching for twenty-five years. Just this past summer, while filming with my Word on Fire team in Ravenna, I had the opportunity to visit Dante's tomb, which I found incomparably moving.

There is so much to admire in The Divine Comedy: its architectonic structure, its lyrical language, its unforgettable metaphors, its cadences and rhythms (impossible to convey in translations), its psychological perceptiveness, its deep humanity, etc. But I would like to focus on its extraordinary spiritual power. How wonderful that arguably the most significant poem in the Western tradition is all about sin and redemption and is suffused through and through with a distinctively Catholic sensibility.

The epic poem opens in the year 1300, when its protagonist was thirty-five, mid-life by a Biblical reckoning:

Continue reading on The Dispatch at CWR.

What is Family?

(us.fotolia.com | Roman Sigaev)
 

What is Family? | Russell Shaw | Catholic World Report

While many say we are witnessing a new and emerging "definition of family", we are actually seeing stark evidence of chaos and collapse

A few houses down the block from mine there’s a house with two women in their late 30s or early 40s and two boys ages 12 or 13 living in it. Just about the only man I’ve ever seen there is the pizza delivery guy, and he doesn’t get beyond the front door.

I suppose each of the women is mother of one of the boys. Now and then I think about those kids and ask myself a question: No doubt they’re members of a family—but what family?

When one of them thinks about his family, does he think about his mother and himself? About himself and his mother and his invisible father? About the four people living in that house down the street—himself, the other boy, the two women? And whatever the answer may be now, how will he think of family ten years from now? How will he picture the family he may have started by then or at least begun thinking about?

If that boy is confused, he’s not the only one. What does family mean to Americans today? As a country, as a society, isn’t America suffering from massive confusion about that?

Looking for something that might shed light on these matters, I came across a statement that President Jimmy Carter issued—January 30, 1978 was the date—formally announcing the White House Conference on Families scheduled later that year. That now forgotten White House Conference talk fest was a controversial minor landmark in the evolution of family policy in the United States. Carter’s statement is very short, but it makes three important points appropriate to the occasion.

First: “Families are both the foundation of American society and its most important institution.”

Second: “The American family is basically sound.”

Continue reading on the CWR site.

Joy! Anticipation! Fire?

(us.fotolia.com | 9comeback)

Joy! Anticipation! Fire? | Carl E. Olson 

Gaudette Sunday, the Third Sunday of Advent, is a day of joy and rejoicing (the Latin word for “rejoice” is gaudere), and the readings reflect this theme

Readings:
• Zep 3:14-18a
• Is 12:2-3, 4, 5-6
• Phil 4:4-7
• Lk 3:10-18

“Great joy,” wrote G. K. Chesterton, “has in it the sense of immortality…” Joy, like love, hope, and goodness, cannot be adequately or convincingly explained through material processes or properties. Joy is a gift pointing to a transcendent giver. And that giver is the Lord, the giver of both natural and supernatural life.

Gaudette Sunday is a day of joy and rejoicing (the Latin word for “rejoice” is gaudere), and the readings reflect this theme. The reading from the prophet Zephaniah contains an exultant call for Israel to shout and sing for joy. Why? Because the Lord had staved off judgment, rebuffed Israel’s enemies, and stood as King and Savior in the midst of the chosen people.

The responsorial Psalm, from the prophet Isaiah, echoes the same: “Cry out with joy and gladness, for among you is the great and Holy One of Israel.” And the Epistle, from St. Paul’s letter to the Philippians, has a hymnic, even rhapsodic, quality: “Rejoice in the Lord always. I shall say it again: rejoice!” The reason, again, is due to the immediacy of God’s intimate, life-giving presence: “The Lord is near.”

The Gospel reading does not directly refer to joy, but instead anticipates and points, through the words of John the Baptist, toward the source of joy. The anticipation has two different but connected qualities. The first is external and focuses on the natural moral virtues; it is drawn out through the question asked by the crowds, the tax collectors, and the soldiers: “What should we do?” John’s response, in essence, is that they should act justly toward their neighbors and those in their communities.

Treating others with respect and acting with justice are, of course, moral and virtuous actions. However, they are lacking to the degree they are solely human. The need for something more is hinted at in the raised expectations of the people, who “were asking in their hearts whether John might be the Christ.” Having recognized the need for natural goodness, they now hunger for supernatural goodness, that is, for the Christ. Having tasted the joy that comes from seeking the good for others, they wish to receive the joy that comes from the good given by God (cf. CCC 1804).

The distinction and relationship between the human and supernatural virtues is highlighted further in comparing the baptism of John the Bapist to the baptism of the Messiah. The first is an external sign, a washing of water symbolizing the need for purity and the desire for holiness. The second is an efficacious sign, a sacrament, which accomplishes what it signifies. “By the action of Christ and the power of the Holy Spirit,” explains the Catechism of the Catholic Church, the sacraments “make present efficaciously the grace that they signify” (par 1084).

What about the fire mentioned by John? While water symbolizes birth and life, “fire symbolizes the transforming energy of the Holy Spirit's actions” (CCC, 696). Both water and fire can destroy, but both are also necessary for life. And in the case of baptism, this life is supernatural, divine, Trinitarian. In baptism, original sin is destroyed, the chasm between God and man is closed, and the soul is ignited with divine fire. Joined in the death of the Son (cf., Rom. 6), those who are baptized are transformed by the Holy Spirit into sons of God, made anew for the glory of the Father, and prepared for life in the new heavens and new earth.

Here, then, is the source and heart of our Advent joy. The season anticipates the celebration of Christ’s birth, but it also illuminates the purpose of the Incarnation: to remove judgment, to destroy sin and death, and to grant intimate, life-giving communion with God. “All seek joy,” said St. John Chrysostom, “but it is not found on earth.” It is found instead in the Son, who comes from heaven to earth—to the crowds, tax collectors, soldiers, and us. Great joy flows from immortality. Rejoice!

(This "Opening the Word" column originally appeared in the December 13, 2009, edition of Our Sunday Visitor newspaper.)