NCR Book Club

THE FUTURE CHURCH: HOW TEN TRENDS ARE REVOLUTIONIZING THE CATHOLIC CHURCH
By John L. Allen Jr.
Published by Doubleday, $28

Perceptive, evenhanded, thought-provoking, horizon-expanding, remarkably well informed--words like these popped into my head as a read John L. Allen Jr.’s new book, The Future Church: How Ten Trends Are Revolutionizing the Catholic Church. I thought I detected in his introduction a note of apology for writing as “a journalist, not a priest, theologian or academic.” His credentials, as NCR readers know, are just fine. If you had doubts, the book will dispel them.

PRAYERFULNESS: AWAKENING TO THE FULLNESS OF LIFE
By Robert J. Wicks
Published by Sorin Books, $20

Although we may often try to repress them, our negative emotions and vulnerabilities can bring us closer to God if we allow ourselves to retain “a sense of intrigue” about our feelings and ourselves. So says prolific spirituality writer Robert Wicks in his recent book Prayerfulness: Awakening to the Fullness of Life.

Mary Gordon on the Gospels as narrative

READING JESUS: A WRITER’S ENCOUNTER WITH THE GOSPELS
By Mary Gordon
Published by Pantheon, $24.95

Late in writers’ careers, they often feel compelled to take on a special challenge, one that demands both the novelist’s skill as a reader of hearts, and, despite the occasional disarray in their own personal lives, the instincts of a moralist.

GRIEVING WITH GRACE: A WOMAN’S PERSPECTIVE
By Dolores R. Leckey
Published by St. Anthony Messenger Press, $11.95

This book is different from many accounts of grieving and remembrance after the loss of a loved one, yet Grieving With Grace, subtitled “A Woman’s Perspective” asks and answers the really big questions that the widowed often have.

THE PRIEST OF PARAGUAY: FERNANDO LUGO AND THE MAKING OF A NATION
By Hugh O’Shaughnessy
Published by Zed Books, $29.95

The former bishop, father of a child and promiscuous beyond that, in effect set the trap on himself. His enemies, however, sprung it on him. Suddenly the obscure Paraguayan President Fernando Lugo, head of a country most people cannot quickly place on a South American map, was notorious.

Author humanizes a revolution all too often stereotyped by the U.S. press

TO CHANGE THE WORLD: MY YEARS IN CUBA
By Margaret Randall
Published by Rutgers University Press, $24.95

Neither a superficial apology nor gratuitous attack, Margaret Randall’s memoir, To Change the World, looks at the Cuban revolution through the eyes of someone who was involved in every aspect of daily life for the 11 years she resided on that island nation.

Latina/o identity in the United States

Fall Books

In her piece in this issue, Gabriella Gutiérrez y Muhs draws on the human senses to connect us to diverse figures that “confuse” and “mystify” us (see story). We are angry, upset, laughing, crying, drunk -- all of those messy emotions that define us as human beings. These are the things that tie us irretrievably to people immensely different from ourselves. Sometimes in the talk of difference and diversity, we forget that lines of difference are always grounded in lines of humanity. The unfamiliar specificity of a stranger’s pain is still pain, and their joy, still joy.

Religious Life

THE SUBVERSIVE POWER OF LOVE: THE VISION OF HENRIETTE DELILLE
By M. Shawn Copeland
Published by Paulist Press, $9.95

The Subversive Power of Love is a slim volume, but it provides memorable insight into the institution of slavery in the United States, and in New Orleans in particular, and paints a picture of the spiritual courage of a black woman whose choice to found a religious order defied the inhumane beliefs that undergirded that institution.

LOSING THE NEWS: THE FUTURE OF THE NEWS THAT FEEDS DEMOCRACY
By Alex S. Jones
Published by Oxford University Press, $24.95

In 1955 my uncle, Frank D. Schroth, publisher of the Brooklyn Eagle, told the New York Newspaper Guild that the Eagle could not afford Manhattan-scale wages, and if they thought he was bluffing and went on strike he would close the paper.

They didn’t believe him, and Brooklyn lost its voice.

So I winced last year when The New York Times put a gun to the head of The Boston Globe, which it owned but could not endure its losses, and told it to take pay cuts or close the paper. The Globe still lives; but it is up for sale. Sister papers in major cities -- The Philadelphia Inquirer, the Newark, N.J., Star-Ledger, the Minneapolis Star Tribune, the Los Angeles Times, and the Hartford Courant in Connecticut -- have decimated their news staffs to survive. Among media critics, the consensus is that a fundamental American institution, the daily city newspaper, will either disappear or morph into an inferior form online.

LEAP OF FAITH: CONFRONTING THE ORIGINS OF THE BOOK OF MORMON
By Bob Bennett
Published by Deseret Book Co. $29.95

WASHINGTON -- When it's time to relax, some senators play golf. Others pour themselves a drink.

But Sen. Bob Bennett, R-Utah, isn't inclined toward the greens and his faith preaches against alcohol.