Hello, everyone! Dr. Tia Pratt and I are excited to announce that A Catholic Witness Against Racism: Insights for Ministry and Education is available for pre-order. This book offers a fantastic collection of chapters written by leading academics and practitioners, and provides key tools from our Catholic tradition for addressing racism in a variety of contexts.

How Congregations Thrive: Fostering Community, Identity, and Mission in Today’s Churches explores ten Los Angeles-area Protestant congregations as they emerged from the pandemic. Through interviews, observations, sermon analysis, surveys and focus groups, this book examines ten characteristics of thriving and the connections between particular practices and congregational vitality.

Happy to share two recent reviews of Crossroads with you all. Both mentioned their appreciation of the interviews for the first time in this series; I’m happy to say we are planning to continue to include these! The first review comes from Review of Religious Research and is written by Dr. Patrick Gilger, SJ, at Loyola University Chicago.

Rosie Chinea Shawver, Executive Director of the Catholic Campus Ministry Association, and I are teaming up with Ave Maria Press to bring you The Campus Minister’s Toolkit. This will be an amazing edited collection exploring a wide variety of topics facing today’s campus ministers. We are in the final stages of revisions with the contributors (who are some of the brightest stars in this field) and the book promises to be incredibly helpful for both new and seasoned ministers. The twenty chapters explore some of the most critical areas of campus ministry, like building partnerships, shaping your mission and vision, intercultural ministry, budget and fundraising, retreat design, and so much more. Something for everyone! I’ll keep you updated on my Books page as we move through the process.

UPDATE: The manuscript has been submitted for copyedits!

I wrote this back in 2019 for JST, my alma mater, but I thought I’d bring it back for those looking to enter into the solemnity of the day. As you can likely tell, it is based off of today’s readings:

I’ll apply an important lesson from my preaching class to this reflection: Your sermon should always provide good news to your listeners.

However, today’s Gospel reading is dark: betrayal, denial, interrogation, intrigue, blame, torture, hubris and the execution of Jesus… good news is not obvious. But, we can see the dimmest of stars on the darkest of nights. After reading the texts several times, I finally saw it, and when we read the crucifixion narratives in the other Gospels, this phrase appears only in John’s account, “The slave’s name was Malchus.”

The latest issue of American Catholic Studies contains a wonderful review of Crossroads. Huge thanks to theologian Dr. Rev. Aaron Wessman, vicar general and director of formation for the Glenmary Home Missioners, for his close read and thoughtful comments.

Happy Feast of the Epiphany! There has been a lot of good news to announce lately and I’m afraid that I am two months late in letting you know that a book based on the first wave of the National Study of Catholic Priests housed at The Catholic Project at the Catholic University of America has been released!

My thanks go out to Dr. Ben Clements of the University of Leicester in the UK for his positive review of Crossroads in the Journal of Contemporary Religion. His review elevated findings from each of the chapters and captured well the insights that the book offers not only to local parishes and dioceses, but also national and international implications. I also appreciated the ways he endorses the urgency and high-stakes nature that we as authors believe our findings point to. Our Church–from the local to the global–is truly at a crossroads. In concluding, Clements writes:

Overall, this is a rich and informative analysis of the sociological structures and wider situation of Catholics in American society, accessibly written and thoughtful in its consideration of the findings and their relevance for internal debates in the Catholic Church. Readers will find much to learn about change and continuity in Catholics’ religious belonging, behaviour, and believing and how these connect to issues of gender, sexuality and equality, and core political debates.

My co-authors and I hope you find this book equally valuable!

Dr. Carol Ann MacGregor of St. Jerome’s University has provided a positive review of Cultural Catholics in the latest issue of American Catholic Studies. In her review, MacGregor highlights some of the book’s key contributions and notes its usefulness for multiple audiences. To offer a pull quote:

“[T]his in depth treatment of cultural Catholics will be of interest to both scholars and those engaged with ministry and leadership of Catholic organizations…. Overall, this book does a compelling job of emphasizing the heterogeneity among American Catholics in ways that are both rigorous and accessible.”

Thank you, Carol Ann, for helping bring this book to interested readers!