Fr. James Martin, S.J. is on a blog tour to promote the release of his book My Life With the Saints
June 2: Some Have Hats
June 3: A Nun’s Life
June 4: The Dawn Patrol
June 5: The Anchoress
June 6: Happy Catholic
He will be answering questions in the comboxes.
A total shutout of blogs written by men. I demand equality!!! Actually I really liked his book My Life With the Saints
His Catholic upbringing was rather sparse and surprisingly he discovered many saints for the first time while in seminary, even those these saints are not exactly obscure – but really quite well known. I would give one caveat about his book though. While it is mostly free of liberal Catholic bias (he identified himself a liberal Catholic on the NYT Pope blog), there are a couple of instances of it. Though I would still highly recommend his book. At one points he talks about being obedient by mentioning his superiors warned him about writing on topics that would be considered "controversial" (read dissent). In my mind it seems to me that obedience would be better met by not saying you are being obedient and then inferring you hold opinions contrary to Church teaching. The other annoying thing is that some times he would try to make conflicts saints had with the Church to be almost a blanket apology for dissent.
Regardless, check out all of these blogs for his blog tour. * A Nuns Life is more in the progressive camp.
2 comments
Hi there,
I’m Fr. Martin’s PR person from Loyola Press. I’m glad to hear people are interested in his blog tour. I apologize if it looks like a “girl blog tour” but that is because the girls responded to the offer & they won out. That being said, there will be a Saints in Cyberspace part II & I promise it will have men bloggers hosting the tour. I already have 2 male bloggers who already grabbed two of the days. 🙂
I really enjoyed Fr. Martin’s book on the saints, but I do have to make one comment. I have a similar, secular background and so many things Catholic are new to me. I didn’t know much about St. Bernadette, so I got the book Fr. Martin refers to from our local library. It was HILARIOUS. Along with not making much sense, it was very feminist and very Freudian. Lots of comments about Bernadette unconsciously doing this and that, and her body making a physical connection between the earth and the sky, etc. etc. How Fr. Martin even got through it, much less got anything out of it, is a mystery to me. Sorry, I don’t remember the title.