More Free Catholic Books, from CatholiCity.com

Posted by -
These days, with the proliferation of ebooks, many of us are figuratively wading through heaps of free books. Twenty years ago, however, when the Mary Foundation and Saint Jude Media began giving away books, people thought they were crazy. Of course, Saint Jude Media was giving away actual, physical books, so there was considerable cost involved: typsetting, printing, binding, shipping and handling. Nonetheless, their books (also CDs) were available for free, although they did ask for a donation. I was heartened to see recently that they are still at it, on their CatholiCity web site.

CatholiCity.com is an apostolate dedicated to feeding the minds and edifying the souls of ordinary Catholics. On the website, there is a wealth of resources that serve this end: a number of talks on the Sacraments and the rosary, which can be ordered on CD, downloaded as podcasts, or listened to online; links to the latest Catholic news and commentary, prayers, devotions, the Baltimore Catechism, the new Catechism in "simplified" form, and lots more. If you are Catholic, or just interested in what the Catholic Church teaches and believes, you should take a look at this web site, and take advantage of the free information available there.

I haven't yet mentioned my favorite things from Saint Jude Media, three free Catholic novels (paperbacks, not ebooks) by Bud Macfarlane Jr.:
  • Pierced by a Sword, recommended by Michael O'Brien, author of Father Elijah, who says: 
Get ready for a journey of epic proportions--rather, cosmic proportions. This book is a little treasure, a marvel. This is an adventure, a comedy, a tragedy, a turbulent odyssey and a peaceful stroll. Most of all, this is a love story like no other I have ever read. A new kind of love story.
  • Conceived without Sin, recommended by Thomas W. Case, author of Moonie Buddhist Catholic, who says:
One strange and wonderful thing about Bud Macfarlane's storytelling is that his people are so loved by the author that they grab you and hold you. This novel is plainly a story of love and marriage and friendship and conversion. Supernatural forces weave in and out, as they must do in real stories of the faith.
  • House of Gold, recommended by John D. O'Brien, editor of Conceived Without Sin and Father Elijah, who says:
You won't read a more timeless novel than House of Gold -- even if you are reading it one hundred years after it was first published. It offers suffering. I know that sounds strange, but you will love the suffering inside its pages. It's honest, authentic, gut-wrenching. It's real. I believe this is Bud Macfarlane's best work. It offers the Cross. Can you take it?
 I read all of these years ago (late 1990s) when they first came out, and enjoyed them all. They have "sold" well (someone is paying for them, because Bud Macfarlane couldn't have afforded to get more than 700,000 copies into print on his own), and reader reviews on sites like Amazon and Goodreads are very positive. I'm glad to see that they are available in Kindle editions for just $2.00. I wish I'd known that a couple of weeks ago (it is not mentioned on the CatholicCity.com website), because I recently acquired new copies of the paperbacks. I love having my books in the Amazon cloud, and these are big, fat novels (more than 550 pages each) that take up a lot of space. Still, I know I won't have any trouble finding friends to pass them on to; I might even recommend them to my book club for our 2013 line-up.

I won't say too much about these novels now, because it's been years since I read them and I don't remember them well, except to say that I enjoyed them. However, I will review them here as I read them. Meanwhile, if you have read them and want to offer your thoughts, please click the comment link below!

Popular posts from this blog

Grace and Purification in Flannery O'Connor's “Revelation”

Posted by -
Image
A recent comment on an old post about Flannery O'Connor raises some questions that I thought I would respond to in a separate post, rather than depositing them in the obscurity of the comm box. Janet Baker left a long comment (you can read it in its entirety there), which says in part: I'm currently working on the short story Revelation, looking at the text for what it says about Flannery's Catholicism, rather than listening to her pronouncements in non-fiction, like her letters. If you read the story, you will note that it is Mrs. Turpin's virtues that must be burned away before she enters heaven, and that people enter heaven in groups, racial and social. Perhaps you don't read either St. Thomas Aquinas, or Teilhard de Chardin, nor have I extensively, but if you begin to read about it, you'll see that St. Thomas promotes the virtues of which Mrs. Turpin is guilty--generous almsgiving, supporting the Church, helping others regardless of their worthines
Keep reading »

The Story of the Flood in the Epic of Gilgamesh

Posted by -
Image
Today we come to the second part of our examination of the story of the Great Flood found in the Epic of Gilgamesh — wherein we will look at the story itself . I'm actually going to break this into two separate posts, a summary of the story and the interpretation of it, which I'll combine with an examination of the story's significance. Before I do that, however, let's recap what we've already covered in Part 1 . Last time, in the first step, the rhetorical analysis, we noted that the Flood account is really a story-within-a-story, which means we need to consider it along with the larger story that contains it. This narrative technique is sometimes called a “ frame tale ,” a term that is very appropriate in this case because the story of Gilgamesh provides the frame (context) for the part we're most interested in, and the Flood story is what gets framed (the focus of our attention). Still, although we are most interested in the Flood account, the relation
Keep reading »

Reading and the Moral Imagination: Plato and truth in fiction

Posted by -
Image
Nota Bene: I originally published this post back in 2012, and it has been one of the most-read posts on this blog ever since. In fact, it sums up pretty well my defense of the necessity of literature — an apologia pro literatura , if you will. For this reason, I’ve decided to pin it here to the top of the blog, so that anyone who stumbles on this site accidentally will know what I’m on about. If you want to know more, try reading some of the other articles in the “popular posts” list that you’ll find in the sidebar to the right. Welcome, and don’t feel shy about leaving comments. I respond to all comments on this blog (which is how I happened to write my most popular post of all time ). Some time ago, I lamented the fact that people — even allegedly “educated” people — these days are reading less and less; and I began to explore the question of why this fact should alarm us. Isn't reading just one of many ways to amuse ourselves in idle moments? Why should reading novels, say,
Keep reading »

Mystery, thrills and suspense from contemporary Catholic writers

Posted by -
Image
I was sorting through a bunch of goodies that I picked up last August at the combined Catholic Writers Guild/New Media/Marketing Network conference and thought I would pass them on to you, before I "file" them (you know what that means). Among other things, I nabbed a number of marketing cards for novels written by members of the Catholic Writers Guild, and I thought I would commend these books to your consideration (even though I have not read most of them). A few that don't get mentioned here will be noted over on my Catholic Science Fiction blog . Today, I thought I would focus on suspense and mystery titles. Here goes: Unbridled Grace: A True Story about the Power of Choice , by Michael J. Norman. This one actually is not fiction, but fact. The author is a chiropractor from right here in the Dallas/Fort Worth area, whose true story sounds like a best-selling thriller. Dr. Norman got dragged into a rats' nest of intrigue when he unknowingly got involved with a
Keep reading »

Rerum Novarum in context

Posted by -
Image
Res novae Pope Leo XIII wrote his encyclical Rerum Novarum at the end of the nineteenth century. The previous hundred years had seen a huge upheaval in the way people in the Western world lived and thought. Some changes happened so fast that, even after a hundred years, the world hadn’t yet figured out how to deal adequately with situations that were already a fact of life. One proposed “solution” to the problems of the Western world was set forth in The Communist Manifesto , written by Friedrich Engels and Karl Marx, but as Pope Leo saw clearly, not only didn’t the Marxist solution fix anything, it only made things worse. That’s the main reason the Holy Father wrote Rerum Novarum , which is perhaps the first papal encyclical that found widespread resonance outside the Catholic Church. Linguistic context: The title Before we look more closely at the social, political, and religious context in which this encyclical letter was written, I’d like to say something about its titl
Keep reading »

Moral Imagination: Beauty, Truth, and Goodness

Posted by -
Image
Recently I wrote about literature as being capable of conveying, and even discovering, truth, which can be called “poetic knowledge.” Both Aristotle and St Thomas Aquinas upheld a similar view, Aristotle by demonstrating that poetry is “more philosophical” (i.e., more capable of demonstrating truth) than history, and St Thomas acknowledging poetry as a kind of “science” ( scientia ) or knowledge, albeit a lower form of knowledge than philosophy because it relies more on imagination than intellect. Today I’d like to consider the value of beauty, an abstract value, but one that we often associate with poetry, as well as music and the fine arts. Beauty lifts us up My thoughts are prompted by this interesting feature article from the National Catholic Register, “True Beauty Satisfies the Human Heart,” an interview by Trent Beattie of psychologist Margaret Laracy, who identifies beauty as a kind of knowledge. Laracy has made a study of the healing effects of beauty on thos
Keep reading »

Epic poetry and the moral imagination

Posted by -
Image
This fall I’ve been teaching a course on Medieval Epic Poetry, a continuation of the Ancient Epic course I taught last spring, in which we read Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey and Vergil’s Aeneid , poems that are all deeply grounded in a pagan worldview but which nonetheless examine human nature, and particularly human excellence, in such an authentic way that they continue to speak profoundly to readers in our own day. Still, the pagan world that produced those works valued things that sometimes run counter to Christian values, so their heroes may seem strange and not entirely admirable to a modern Christian. Nonetheless, all the poems we read in the Medieval Epic course are written by Christian poets who have, to one extent or another, appropriated the epic tradition and made it their own. What does it mean to be a hero? Achilles was famous for his godlike rage. This shows, on the one hand, the powerful appeal of the epic form and, on the other hand, the way Christians have
Keep reading »