Winter wanderings

on the Way

It’s been a record-breaking winter of snow out here on Long Island. But spring is coming! In the meantime, some updates from the past three months:

The Way of Heaven and Earth

• THE WAY TURNS ONE: The Way of Heaven and Earth celebrated its first birthday on February 10, the feast of Saint Scholastica. I marked the occasion with a comprehensive list of Catholic both/ands—the completion of what had originally been the draft of a second appendix to the book. I hope people find it a helpful resource! My promotion of the book itself will certainly slow down now, but the promotion of the both/and goes on!

• AMERICA MAGAZINE REVIEW: Terence Sweeney, a professor at the pope’s alma mater Villanova, graciously reviewed the book in America magazine’s March issue. Overall it was a positive review, though he did make a few (I think fair) criticisms of the book. (I may offer a response down the road here on Substack, just so I can insist on having the last word.) I’m so grateful to him for his thoughtful read of the text and his candid analysis. It’s a thrill for me to have my book reviewed in the pages of the same journal that has published names like Thomas Merton, Flannery O’Connor, and G. K. Chesterton.

• SON RISE MORNING SHOW: Since mid-October, I’ve been joining the Anna Mitchell and Matt Swaim on The Son Rise Morning Show on Tuesdays around 8:40 a.m. ET to walk through The Way chapter by chapter. Before Lent is over, we’ll be moving into the third and final part of the book: The Dilemmas of Christianity. Join us!

Writing

• SUBSTACK: Pieces on Pope Leo’s ratification of the both/and, Andy Squyers’ album Sacred Vows, and our fundamental goodness/badness; a round-up of Substacker articles on the both/and; and a comprehensive list of both/ands.

• WOF: A piece on the new film Moses the Black.

• CATHOLIC WORLD REPORT: Pieces on Ven. Fulton Sheen and the double meaning of the words of consecration, Matthew Ramage’s Essential Guide to Ratzinger, and four lessons in sanity from Saint Thomas Aquinas.

• NATIONAL CATHOLIC REGISTER: A piece on what Paul VI said (and didn’t say) about the “smoke of Satan.”

• CRUX: A piece on the last book of John L. Allen Jr. (1965–2026) and his vision of a “Catholic commons.”

Word on Fire

• I AM A SON OF SAINT AUGUSTINE: February 23 marked the launch of a new book from Word on Fire I had the great honor of editing: I Am a Son of Saint Augustine: Pope Leo XIV on His Favorite Saint (just 3 dollars a copy, with free shipping on orders of 20 books or more). The book features a variety of reflections on Augustine from Pope Leo (as early as his doctoral dissertation as a young priest and as recent as his first apostolic exhortation, Dilexi Te); a wonderful foreword by Sister Margaret Atkins, a canoness of the Order of Saint Augustine in England; and other nice features like a timeline of Leo’s life, his coat of arms, and the full text of the Rule of Saint Augustine. On the day of his election, Leo introduced himself to the world as “a son of Saint Augustine,” and it seems to me that in getting to know him, we should take him at his word. This book is a great place to start!

• THE BODY OF THIS DEATH: Word on Fire Publishing has released some fantastic books since its inception. But I wanted to take a minute to single out a new title this year that I personally think is really special—in fact, destined to become a classic: The Body of This Death: Letters from the Last Archbishop of Lancaster by Ross McCullough. When we passed around this book in manuscript form, our team was in agreement on two basic facts: (1) It was difficult to determine how to publish it; and (2) We had to publish it. The book is on our academic imprint (McCullough is a theologian at George Fox University), but is an epistolary novel set against a dystopian future. I won’t say more except that, when I read it, it called to my mind classics like The Screwtape Letters and Notes from Underground. If you’re still not convinced, read Christianity Today’s fantastic review. If you love the literary tradition of the West, especially existentialist Christians like Dostoevsky, Pascal, and Kierkegaard, this is a must-read.

• SPEAKING OF DOSTOEVSKY AND LEWIS—THREE OTHER LAUNCHES: This winter, we also launched three other wonderful new books on the general imprint: The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoevsky (December 8), a masterpiece of Russian literature (and probably the best novel I’ve ever read—which leads us to . . .); Peter Kreeft’s The Two Greatest Novels Ever Written: The Wisdom of “The Lord of the Rings” and “The Brothers Karamazov,” an exploration of Tolkien’s and Dostoevsky’s treatments of good and evil, power and weakness, and virtue and vice; and The Mirror, the Mask, and the Masterpiece: A Guide to C. S. Lewis’s “Till We Have Faces” (February 2), Kreeft’s philosophical and theological guide to one of Lewis’s favorite of his own books—and his most controversial. (It also comes with a matching edition of Lewis’s novel, which is fantastic: the best fiction by Lewis I’ve read yet, and the most religious novel I’ve ever encountered in my life.) Kreeft is one of my great heroes; I highly recommend anything he writes, and he continues to crank out wonderful books well into his 80s! Speaking of age . . .

A life update: The quadragenarian cometh . . .

Despite my best attempt to remain in my 30s for a while longer, alas: “O let not Time deceive you, you cannot conquer Time.” Next month will mark my fortieth rotation around this sun. The milestone feels especially charged, as I distinctly remember my mom’s fortieth birthday. I was about eight years old, and she was reading to us a small magnet or card that said, “Forty isn’t old if you’re a tree.” Just moments later, she took a bad fall down the stairs, breaking her collarbone. I don’t remember what happened after that except my brother and I crying. “Forty” has thus, I’m sure, lurked in my subconscious with a kind of flashing warning sign: Here be dragons—of calamity, vulnerability, injury.

Then again, at the risk of sounding trite, life is never promised, to any of us, ever. When I was about the same age, I received news that a young kid on my hockey team, a meek boy who was bullied (“The notion of some infinitely gentle, infinitely suffering thing . . .”), died unexpectedly after a horrible head injury at a pool. He’s always stuck with me. I think sometimes about all the life I’ve lived since: high school, college, marriage, kids—things he never experienced. Life can come to an abrupt end, sometimes very unexpectedly and violently. It happens all the time, to so many people. The important thing is, as the old saying goes, to “have your bags packed”—which means believing in God’s Son, turning away from sin, and abiding in love (1 John 4:16).

And to abide in that love wherever God has seen fit to put us! Indeed, another thing I’ve learned in my forty years (if I’ve learned anything) is that everything happens in phases, which pass just as suddenly as they come—days or even weeks of transition seeming, in retrospect, like a flash. In a higher world, it is otherwise; here below, nothing lasts. The home, the job, the friends, the activities that seem so central and vital today will be tomorrow’s “good old times” soon enough. Just give it time. And so much about those shifts between phases is out of our hands. The wheel of fortune turns—and turns again. And if “you live long enough, people get old . . .”

So our job is not so much to orchestrate the course of our own lives—how could we?—as to love God and others the best we can where circumstances (even, as Charley Crockett sang, “hard luck and circumstances”) find us.

I’ll conclude with Bishop Erik Varden’s final words in his interview with Catholic World Report:

I have recently engaged a great deal with the legacy of Blessed Jurgis Matulaitis, a great Lithuanian confessor who died in 1927. He wrote in his diary: “Lord, let me be a dishrag in your Church, fit to wipe up messes and then to be thrown away into some dark corner. I want to be used and worn out like this so that your house may be a little cleaner and brighter.”

These days, when a worldly tendency would recast the Christian vocation triumphalistically in terms of culture wars, we need this perspective. It challenges us to devote ourselves faithfully to Christ’s ongoing salvific work, to let ourselves be used where we are needed, with no concern to be seen and praised, pursuing the good because it is good, loving it because it is loveable, sharing it because we want others to be genuinely happy.

This is how a real renewal of the Church comes about. This is how, little by little, the face of the earth is renewed.