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The Best Catholic Writing 2004
In this first anthology in the annual Best Catholic Writing series, today's most powerful, provocative voices on Catholic matters are brought together in a celebration of Catholic writing and the Catholic literary heritage. Exploring the question What is Catholic writing? editor Brian Doyle proposes that it is not only writing by Catholics, for Catholics, or on Catholic matters, but is also catholic, universal, in nature. The works collected in The Best Catholic Writing 2004 are wide-ranging, eloquent, and riveting. With essays on Catholic art, conjugal sex, and Harry Potter; a remembrance of Dorothy Day; an elegy for Fred Rogers; examinations of the current dark chapter in the history of the Catholic Church; and poetic reflections on faith and the Catholic life, this anthology serves as "a form of prayer, a communal story swap, a jolt of hope." Featuring such writers as Alice McDermott, Andrew Greeley, Paul Elie, and Kathleen Norris, this first-ever collection of best Catholic writing reveals that "everything, seen with a clear enough eye, is meant for the Catholic mind."
Paperback
First published October 1, 2004
16 people want to read
About the author
Brian Doyle
62 books730 followersDoyle's essays and poems have appeared in The Atlantic Monthly, Harper's, The American Scholar, Orion, Commonweal, and The Georgia Review, among other magazines and journals, and in The Times of London, The Sydney Morning Herald, The Kansas City Star, The San Francisco Chronicle, The Ottawa Citizen, and Newsday, among other newspapers. He was a book reviewer for The Oregonian and a contributing essayist to both Eureka Street magazine and The Age newspaper in Melbourne, Australia.
Doyle's essays have also been reprinted in:
* the Best American Essays anthologies of 1998, 1999, 2003, and 2005;
* in Best Spiritual Writing 1999, 2001, 2002, and 2005; and
* in Best Essays Northwest (2003);
* and in a dozen other anthologies and writing textbooks.
As for awards and honors, he had three startling children, an incomprehensible and fascinating marriage, and he was named to the 1983 Newton (Massachusetts) Men's Basketball League all-star team, and that was a really tough league.
Doyle delivered many dozens of peculiar and muttered speeches and lectures and rants about writing and stuttering grace at a variety of venues, among them Australian Catholic University and Xavier College (both in Melbourne, Australia), Aquinas Academy (in Sydney, Australia); Washington State, Seattle Pacific, Oregon, Utah State, Concordia, and Marylhurst universities; Boston, Lewis & Clark, and Linfield colleges; the universities of Utah, Oregon, Pittsburgh, and Portland; KBOO radio (Portland), ABC and 3AW radio (Australia); the College Theology Society; National Public Radio's "Talk of the Nation," and in the PBS film Faith and Doubt at Ground Zero (2002).
Doyle was a native of New York, was fitfully educated at the University of Notre Dame, and was a magazine and newspaper journalist in Portland, Boston, and Chicago for more than twenty years. He was living in Portland, Oregon, with his family when died at age 60 from complications related to a brain tumor.
Doyle's essays have also been reprinted in:
* the Best American Essays anthologies of 1998, 1999, 2003, and 2005;
* in Best Spiritual Writing 1999, 2001, 2002, and 2005; and
* in Best Essays Northwest (2003);
* and in a dozen other anthologies and writing textbooks.
As for awards and honors, he had three startling children, an incomprehensible and fascinating marriage, and he was named to the 1983 Newton (Massachusetts) Men's Basketball League all-star team, and that was a really tough league.
Doyle delivered many dozens of peculiar and muttered speeches and lectures and rants about writing and stuttering grace at a variety of venues, among them Australian Catholic University and Xavier College (both in Melbourne, Australia), Aquinas Academy (in Sydney, Australia); Washington State, Seattle Pacific, Oregon, Utah State, Concordia, and Marylhurst universities; Boston, Lewis & Clark, and Linfield colleges; the universities of Utah, Oregon, Pittsburgh, and Portland; KBOO radio (Portland), ABC and 3AW radio (Australia); the College Theology Society; National Public Radio's "Talk of the Nation," and in the PBS film Faith and Doubt at Ground Zero (2002).
Doyle was a native of New York, was fitfully educated at the University of Notre Dame, and was a magazine and newspaper journalist in Portland, Boston, and Chicago for more than twenty years. He was living in Portland, Oregon, with his family when died at age 60 from complications related to a brain tumor.
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Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews
November 22, 2014
There's some lovely writing in this book, some that's very serious and some that is not-so-serious.
There's a beautiful piece "The Leper: Robert's Story" about a Jesuit and his friendship with a gay man dying of AIDS. The editor, Brian Doyle, has a sad and gorgeously simple piece about the 9/11 attack on the World Trade Center.
Fr. James Martin, S.J., offers an article about his lack of knowledge of Latin (as a late vocation) -- and that's one of the more amusing pieces.
One problem with writings about Catholicism is that it's not so interesting to read nice pious pieces, and there aren't any in this book. Conflict, struggle, tension are what draw us in, and that's understandable.
I think there was room in this collection for more writing about inward and personal struggle, however. The saints write about it extensively, as do Flannery O'Connor and Thomas Merton, who are both unlikely to be canonized. This collection tends to focus far more on the exterior, rather than the interior -- on other people's sin, rather than the writers' own.
In the very first paragraph of the very first essay in this collection, though, novelist Alice McDermott talks about what a bad Catholic she is and tells stories about skipping Mass.
Well, we're *all* bad Catholics, of course. And Catholic writing doesn't have to full of piety to be *Catholic,* either. I just wish this otherwise enjoyable collection didn't start off with the kind of casual dismissal of a pretty serious sin that has become unfortunately all-too-common in the writing of educated Catholics.
Editor Brian Doyle was picking stories from 2004, and it's highly likely and unfortunate that what I am seeking just wasn't easily found then -- or now.
There's a beautiful piece "The Leper: Robert's Story" about a Jesuit and his friendship with a gay man dying of AIDS. The editor, Brian Doyle, has a sad and gorgeously simple piece about the 9/11 attack on the World Trade Center.
Fr. James Martin, S.J., offers an article about his lack of knowledge of Latin (as a late vocation) -- and that's one of the more amusing pieces.
One problem with writings about Catholicism is that it's not so interesting to read nice pious pieces, and there aren't any in this book. Conflict, struggle, tension are what draw us in, and that's understandable.
I think there was room in this collection for more writing about inward and personal struggle, however. The saints write about it extensively, as do Flannery O'Connor and Thomas Merton, who are both unlikely to be canonized. This collection tends to focus far more on the exterior, rather than the interior -- on other people's sin, rather than the writers' own.
In the very first paragraph of the very first essay in this collection, though, novelist Alice McDermott talks about what a bad Catholic she is and tells stories about skipping Mass.
Well, we're *all* bad Catholics, of course. And Catholic writing doesn't have to full of piety to be *Catholic,* either. I just wish this otherwise enjoyable collection didn't start off with the kind of casual dismissal of a pretty serious sin that has become unfortunately all-too-common in the writing of educated Catholics.
Editor Brian Doyle was picking stories from 2004, and it's highly likely and unfortunate that what I am seeking just wasn't easily found then -- or now.
July 25, 2008
Not as good as the other one that I read but still very interesting. Several of the works centered around the sexual abuse scandal that was going on in the American Catholic Church at the time and the last piece was about the attack on the twin towers which was very beautiful but very sad. Overall, I liked this one less than the other one I read but I will still seek out more of these collections. I think this was the first one that Brian Doyle put together.
October 1, 2010
Many thought-provoking essays that remind me what I love and don't love about the church.
January 7, 2012
My favorite writing from this collection was one entitled "The Leper: Robert's Story." I was in tears reading of the friendship between a friar and a gay man suffering from AIDS.
Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews