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  Dear Friends,   Bede Griffiths (1906-1994), one of the great pioneers of East-West dialogue, was. an English Benedictine monk. He volunteered in 1955 to establish a monastery in India, drawn by some instinct that there he would discover “the other half of his soul.” He soon came to believe that the secularized West had much to learn from India and its instinctive “sense of the sacred.” Adapting his monastery to Indian culture, he donned the saffron robe of a Hindu holy man, and tried through his worship and in his writings to express the heart of the gospel through...

Dear Friends,            Father William Hart McNichols is widely known as one of the world’s great religious artists and iconographers. We have previously published several volumes featuring his work, including Christ All Merciful and Mother of God, Similar to Fire. My friend Sister Wendy Beckett said of his icons, “When I look at them I fall into prayer, and that’s it. . . They’re not ‘works of art’ in the worldly sense but functional, living theology, uniting us to Our Lord as we look at them.”             Yet the writing of icons came relatively late on...

  Dear Friends, As we approach the season of Lent, several new Orbis titles invite us on a journey of conversion—or at least a fresh examination of traditional beliefs and engrained narratives. In Come, Have Breakfast: Meditations on God and the Earth, Elizabeth Johnson, one of the foremost Catholic theologians today, continues her project of examining Christian faith in relation to the natural world, the earth, and the threats posed by climate change. In each of these luminous meditations, most inspired by the Psalms and other scriptural texts, she offers a snapshot of God’s care for Creation—a planet in peril—with...

JANUARY 2024   Dear Friends,   We enter a new year fraught with peril and suffering on many fronts: ongoing wars, the effects of climate change; the plight of migrants and refugees; racial injustice and threats to democracy. Many of our new titles this past year have spoken to such issues. (See Henri Nouwen, Ukraine Diary; Mitri Raheb, Decolonizing Palestine; Elizabeth Gandolfo, Ecomartyrdom in the Americas; Why We Can’t Wait: Racism and the Church; Leo Guardado, Church as Sanctuary; and Pope Francis’s warning on the climate crisis, Laudate Deum.   All of these titles reflect the longstanding, prophetic mission of...