Along the trail in Trail Mix we’ll witness a night launch of Navy jets from a nuclear aircraft carrier….. boogie with an integrated throng at a James Brown concert…..chase President Lyndon Johnson around the world in five days…..spike a can of Dinty Moore beef stew with expensive French wine….. hang with preservationists as they save an architectural jewel from demolition…..celebrate a Glorious Fourth with Italian-American fireworks families…..visit terminally ill patients and their pets a...

Sheed & Ward, in partnership with Commonweal magazine, presents the second of two volumes in the groundbreaking series, American Catholics in the Public Square, a project funded by The Pew Charitable Trusts. Essays by scholars, journalists, lawyers, business and labor leaders, church administrators and lobbyists, novelists, activists, policy makers and politicians address the most critical issues facing the Catholic Church in the United States. Volume 2, American Catholics, American Cultur...

Writers of the modern essay can trace their chosen genre all the way back to Michel de Montaigne (1533–92). But save for the recent notable best seller How to Live: A Life of Montaigne by Sarah Bakewell, Montaigne is largely ignored. After Montaigne—a collection of twenty-four new personal essays intended as tribute—aims to correct this collective lapse of memory and introduce modern readers and writers to their stylistic forebear.Though it’s been over four hundre...

A comprehensive series of essays exploring Peter C. Phan’s groundbreaking work to widen Christian theology beyond the Western worldPeter C. Phan’s wide-ranging contributions to theology and his pioneering work on religious pluralism, migration, and Christian identity have made a global impact on the field.The essays in Theology without Borders offer a variety of perspectives across Phan’s fundamental work in eschatology, world christianity, interre...

Proems, taut tales, small stories with rhythm and blues and grace and bruise and laughter between the lines. Brian Doyle’s The Kind of Brave You Wanted to Be is a book of cadenced notes on the swirl of miracle and the holy of attentiveness; a book about children and birds, love and grief and everything alive, which is to say all prayers.

Brian Doyle might just be the most passionate storyteller in America. In this eclectic and compelling collection of stories Doyle writes about his discovery of the incarnated Spirit of God every time he turns around, often in the most unlikely of people, places, and things. In 37 short snapshots, he captures the spiritual essence of everyday life from the perspective of a committed Catholic who loves his faith, his family, his community, and his church, even with all their warts and failin...

A teenage boy and an American pine marten each embark on the adventure of growing up in the award-winning YA novel by the author of Mink River.Dave is fourteen years old, eager, and precocious. He is about to start high school, which is scary and alluring. Martin is a pine marten, a small, muscled hunter of the deep woods. He is about to leave home for the first time, which is scary and thrilling. Both of these wild animals are setting off into the bruising...

From a "born storyteller" (Seattle Times), this playful and moving bestselling book of essays invites us into the miraculous and transcendent moments of everyday life.When Brian Doyle passed away at the age of sixty after a bout with brain cancer, he left behind a cult-like following of devoted readers who regard his writing as one of the best-kept secrets of the twenty-first century. Doyle writes with a delightful sense of wonder about the sanctity of eve...

This lyrical tale of a young man's first foray into adulthood offers "a moving ode to the city of Chicago and the singular nature of its people" ( Booklist, starred review)On the last day of summer, a young college grad moves to Chicago and rents a small apartment on the north side of the city, by the lake. This is the story of the five seasons he lives there in the late 1970s, during which he meets gangsters, gamblers, policemen, a brave and garrulous bus ...

Both intimate and irreverent, The Mighty Currawongs taps into the small truths of what makes a life worth living—from the oddly hilarious to the cherished and pure.A collection of headlong tales by Oregon author Brian Doyle—exploring such riveting and peculiar topics as chess in the Levant, tailors who specialize in holes, how to report stigmata to your attending physician, the intense hilarity of basketball, how to have a bitter verbal marital fight in yo...

Brian Doyle was a one-of-a-kind author who wrote one-of-a-kind prayers about everyday subjects that help readers change the way they see the world.Prayers for cashiers and good shoes; for shorter sermons and better senators; prayers for the bruised, foolish, glorious, stumbling, brilliant Church; for chaplains and mathematicians; for idiot authors and muddy dogs: These are the most heartfelt and headlong prayers you will ever read and share—the grinning, snarling prayers we mouth q...

In this award-winning paean to country life we find Hubbo O'Driscoll, whom we first met in Easy Avenue, now living in the lower Gatineau with his guardian aunt and uncle. When the local covered bridge -- home to a wayward ghost and her lovelorn postman -- is threatened by development, Hubbo must devise a strategy to save it.