So Very Much The Best Of Us

by Brian Doyle

25 practical passionate perceptive professors share what they are really trying to teach their students.

Two professors asked fellow faculty members at the University of Portland, a Holy Cross institution in the Pacific Northwest, what it is they really teach. The answer is revealed in the insights and anecdotes of this remarkable collection of essays.

Here twenty-five distinguished professors reveal the philosophy that drives their work in a wide variety of academic helping students recognize and develop their own gifts and discover the deepest longing of their lives. Essays will surprise and inspire students and parents alike, and will encourage educators to be attentive and awake in fresh ways as they engage their students.

Selections

• Touched by the Infinite, Rev. Charles McCoy, CSC

• Faith, Hope, and A Trinity of Uncertainty, Steven G. Mayer

• An Invitation to Star-Gazing, Michael Andrews

• Spelunking with a Dim Flashlight, Rev. Patrick Hannon, CSC

• The Many Facets of Humanness, Anissa Rogers

• Everything Always Has a Past, Christin Hancock

• The Flourishing of Every Soul, Karen E. Eifler

• Halfway between the Head and the Heart, Nicole Leupp Hanig

• The Urgency of Slowness, Lars Larson

• Engineering Creativity, Heather Dillon????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????

Genres: Essays, Nonfiction

220 pages, Paperback

First published September 15, 2015

About the author

Doyle'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.

Reviews

[Marigold · Rating 3 out of 5]

First, the "publisher"? description of this on Goodreads is WRONG! This is a book of essays by Brian Doyle, not a book of essays by a variety of writers.
Doyle was the editor of the University of Portland's literary/spiritual magazine, as well as a novelist, essayist, poet, and a passionate Catholic. I'm an agnostic, but I love Doyle's writing and find it comforting in times of trouble - hello, 2020. As a person who strives to be open to a variety of perspectives, I wanted to read this though I knew this collection was definitely essays about Catholicism and from a Catholic perspective.
Because these were all somewhat "samey", I didn't LOVE this collection as much as I normally love everything Doyle wrote, but I liked it. Doyle may be the only writer whose Catholic perspective I can admire and not feel sort of icky about. I can read his essays and see why he believed as he did, and I know he was a great guy, and I know there are liberal Catholics out there, who practice their faith with love.
As an example of Doyle's thinking, one of the essays is called "A Light in the Darkness". It's about assisted suicide, somewhat suicide in general. He talks about each person having their own struggles that no other person can truly know about, and what a place of darkness someone might find themselves in. He writes: "...remember that you may find yourself in just such a prison, searching desperately for a window, a door, a crack of light, a hint of possibility that someday you might be released. Be tender, for love is greater than justice; and it may be that the quiet prayers we offer for those who are lost in this way are indeed the keys by which they are released in another world and brought home to That From Which All Light Derives."
I think this is a beautiful thought.
I observe here that I finished this on the day Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg passed; she was Jewish, but I still think the title of this collection speaks to her legacy. And I think she and Doyle would have enjoyed each other. I was happy to have had this reminder of Praise - or gratitude - at the forefront of my mind when I heard the news of her passing. So maybe I was brought to this collection for a reason.

[Carol Bakker · Rating 5 out of 5]

Back-to-back, I've read two authors whose prose has captured my ardent admiration even though we do not share the same first principles: Brian Doyle who was (sadly, he died [age 61?] in 2017) a devout Catholic and Michael Perry, a self-proclaimed agnostic.

Also, because I love reading intersections, I randomly read this book concurrently with John McPhee's Coming into the Country. Brian Doyle's dedication is for my friend John McPhee, with thanks for countless hours of exuberant grinning story-trading.

So much of what Doyle wrote resonated with me: the camaraderie of growing up in a large family, little kids in mass (again, not Catholic, but little kids are half of the congregants in my church's services), a propulsion to express gratitude even when things are mysterious.

Quotes worth copying:

caterpillar eyebrows

There is a Singing, a Breathing, a Mercy beyond accounting under and through all things.

...wondering afterwards at the etiology of my annoyance.

what seems jest is joust

I have seen nurses help bring my children out of the sea of their mother and into the sharp and bracing air of this world.

Humility is the final frontier for us all.

Loam and pet, muck and mire, clay and chalk,
bog and sand, shale and stone: I sing the song
of the skin of the earth.

[Jeanette · Rating 5 out of 5]

Brian Doyle knows how to take ordinary life events and make them shimmer with story and meaning. I've always been inspired by his writing, ever since I read "Leap" in association with 9-11.

[Judy · Rating 4 out of 5]

Brian Doyle is a storyteller. There are 81 stories in this book. They will make you laugh and weep. Doyle is a gift. Thank you.