In this series, we highlight books we think our readers may enjoy, written by authors affiliated with the Collegeville Institute.
Grieving Together: A Couple’s Journey through Miscarriage
Our Sunday Visitor, 2018
By Laura Kelly Fanucci, Project Director, Communities of Calling Initiative, and Franco David Fanucci
Drawing from real-life perspectives of parents who have experienced miscarriage, stillbirth, and infant loss, Grieving Together: A Couple’s Journey through Miscarriage is a companion through the common questions and crises that arise after the death of a baby. The book offers Catholic resources including Scripture, prayers, official rites, and theological teaching that speaks to the hardest questions surrounding the loss of a child: Why did God let this happen? Is our baby in heaven? Was this God’s plan? Unlike miscarriage resources that focus only on mothers, Grieving Together also explores fathers’ grief and offers a practical and compassionate guide to help couples grow together through their loss.
Threshold of Discovery: A Field Guide to Spiritulity in Midlife
Church Publishing, 2019
By L. Roger Owens, former workshop participant
Roger Owens, facing a “dark night of the soul” as he turned forty and entered midlife, was encouraged by his spiritual director to think of it instead as a “threshold of discovery.” Rather than go on a grand adventure like walking the Appalachian Trail or the Camino de Santiago, he decided to mark his fortieth year by taking forty walks in a nearby nature preserve. With patience and attention, he explored the concerns rising within him: the inevitability of death, his boredom with life, and the reality of his changing faith, changing images of God, and changing sense of self. The result is Threshold of Discovery, a book with forty short chapters that weave together insightful stories of his walks with accessible history and practices of Christian spirituality and the lives of saints.
The Soul’s Slow Ripening: 12 Celtic Practices for Seeking the Sacred
Sorin Books, September 2018
By Christine Valters Paintner, former workshop participant
In her latest book titled The Soul’s Slow Ripening, Christine Valters Paintner, bestselling Catholic author and online abbess for Abbey of the Arts, shares one of the most ancient paths to understanding God’s will. The Celtic way, which Paintner distills into twelve practices, offers discernment that focuses on the environment rather than the intellectual focus present in other forms of discernment. It allows for what Paintner calls the “soul’s slow ripening.” She uses reflections, stories, guided activities, prayer experiences, and a variety of creative arts to help you patiently and attentively listen to God’s invitation, drawing from her study of monasticism and immersion in Celtic spirituality while living in Ireland.
Unbind(ing)
Conviction 2 Change, October 2018
By Asher Marron, former Resident Scholar
Asher Marron book of poems titled Unbind(ing) are “about the risk of radical self-love and radical hope for a re-imagining of the relationship between Catholicism and queerness.”
Read an interview with Marron where she discusses this book on Bearings Online »
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