Catholic Women Preach: Raising Voices, Renewing the Church (Orbis Books, 2024) is the third installment of a series of books featuring homilies offered by Catholic women from around the world on the Gospel readings for Sundays and holy days. The volumes have been co-edited by Elizabeth Donnelly and Boston College graduate Russ Petrus. The most recent volume is for Cycle C in the Catholic Lectionary. BC faculty, alumnae, and student contributors to this volume of Catholic Women Preach are Kayla August; M. Shawn Copeland; Brenna Davis; Emily Rauer Davis; Melinda Brown Donovan; Colleen Gibson, SSJ; Margaret Eletta Guider, OSF; Kristin Heyer; Valerie Lewis-Mosley; Catherine Mooney; Barbara Quinn, RSCJ; Jane Regan; and Elizabeth Turnwald.
Catholic women preaching
The Boston game
On Boston Common stands a monument dedicated to the Oneida Football Club. It honors the site where, in the 1860s, 16 boys played what was then called the “Boston game”—an early version of football in the United States. In the 1920s, a handful of them donated artifacts to museums, deposited self-penned histories into libraries and archives, and erected memorials, all to elevate themselves as the inventors of American football. But was this origin story as straightforward as they made it seem? In the new book Inventing the Boston Game: Football, Soccer, and the Origins of a National Myth (University of Massachusetts Press, 2024) Kevin Tallec Marston and Mike Cronin investigate the history of the Oneida Football Club. In a compelling narrative informed by sports history, Boston history, and the study of memory, the authors posit that these men engaged in self-memorialization to reinforce their elite cultural status during a period of tremendous social and economic change, and particularly increased immigration. An internationally renowned historian, Cronin is the academic director of Boston College Ireland. His publications include Places We Play: Ireland’s Sporting Heritage; A History of Ireland; and The Routledge Handbook of Irish Studies. Update: Read an interview with Cronin via BC News.
What pandemics teach us
Ed Yong, who was awarded the 2021 Pulitzer Prize for Explanatory Reporting for his coverage of the coronavirus pandemic, will present “What Pandemics Teach Us” at Boston College on January 29 at 7 p.m. in Gasson Hall 100. Yong also has been honored for his writing with a 2020 George Polk Award for science reporting and a 2022 Benton Award for Distinguished Public Service. He is the author of the bestselling books An Immense World, a comprehensive look at the sensory worlds of animals, and I Contain Multitudes, a groundbreaking examination of the relationship between animals and microbes. A staff writer at The Atlantic from 2015 to 2023, Yong has also written for National Geographic, The New Yorker, Wired, Nature, New Scientist, and Scientific American. Yong’s lecture, the Gerson Family Lecture, is presented by BC’s Lowell Humanities Series and cosponsored by the Park Street Corporation Speaker Series, Boston College Asian American Studies Program, and Schiller Institute for Integrated Science and Society. The event is free and open to the public, but registration is required.
Higher education in the British Atlantic world
The Universities of Scotland, Ireland and New England during the British Civil Wars: Contested Seminaries (Boydell Press, 2024), written by Boston College alumnus Salvatore Cipriano, provides new insight into the contested nature of higher education in the British Atlantic world between the Reformation and the Enlightenment and corrects outmoded notions about the universities’ purported insularity and intellectual poverty. In Cipriano’s volume, the image that emerges of these universities is one of genuine academies of strategic importance, employed to serve the agendas of ruling powers in Scotland, Ireland, and New England. Trinity College, Dublin, Harvard College, and the Scottish universities existed on the frontiers of a deteriorating composite monarchy with a centralizing impulse, becoming battlegrounds of the mid-17th-century’s intellectual, political, and religious conflicts. Cipriano earned bachelor’s and master’s degrees in history from Boston College. He is an associate director of career coaching and education at Stanford University.
The book of love
Love: A History (Oxford University Press, 2024), edited by BC Moakley Professor of Political Science Ryan Patrick Hanley, traces the history of thinking about love from antiquity to the 20th century, and includes how various literary, cultural, and political representations of love supplement the history of philosophical reflection. According to the publisher, Love: A History “chronicles the most significant moments in this concept’s long and remarkable evolutionary life, ranging from ancient Hebrew and Greek and Christian conceptions of love to those advanced by thinkers from Kierkegaard and Nietzsche and Levinas.” As an interconnected story, the volume also tells a story the ways in which love’s horizons shifted from the transcendent to the immanent.
Nearly dead
How does one recover from a near-death experience? In his memoir, 1974 Boston College graduate Michael J. Hession, M.D., a physician who has cared for critically ill patients for more than 30 years, shares the story of his own near-death experience and his arduous recovery in the hopes of helping others. In Physician Heal Thyself: Nearly Dead and the Journey Back to Health, Dr. Hession details his brush with death from pneumonia, complicated by acute respiratory distress syndrome and then paralysis from the neck down due to Guillain-Barre syndrome. Slowly, he rebuilt his body, both physically and emotionally, with faith, meaning, and purpose playing roles in his recovery. With empathy and practical wisdom, Dr. Hession provides readers with invaluable insights into the complexities of recovery and the human spirit, empowering them to face adversity with courage and grace and offering solace, guidance, and hope.
Navajo carver Clitso Dedman
Clitso Dedman, Navajo Carver (University of Nebraska Press/Bison Books, 2023) by Boston College Professor Emerita Rebecca Valette is an illustrated biography of master wood carver Clitso Dedman, a remarkable and underrecognized 20th-century artist. A former blacksmith and builder, Dedman took up wood carving at age 60. He created wooden sculptures of the various participants in the Yeibichai dance, which closed the Navajo Nightway ceremony. Dedman’s distinctive and highly regarded work can be found in private collections, galleries, and museums, such as the Navajo Nation Museum at Window Rock, the California Academy of Sciences in San Francisco, and the Arizona State Museum in Tucson. Valette and her husband Jean-Paul Valette are co-authors of Weaving the Dance: Navajo Yeibichai Textiles (1910–1950) and Navajo Weavings with Ceremonial Themes: A Historical Overview of a Secular Art Form.
Short stories from an alumna
Men Who Walk in Dreams (Guernica Editions, 2024) is a collection of short stories where men and women cling to ambitions, thwarted love, and misguided assumptions, as they dream to reinvent themselves, seek revenge, foresee the future, recapture that which has escaped their grasp, or merely survive. Written by 1971 Boston College graduate Grace Marisa Labozzetta, Men Who Walk in Dreams will take readers from El Salvador to Cape Cod to Antarctica, from a secluded Italian Snake Festival to a packed subway car to a World War II bomber. Her story “The Woman Who Drew on Walls,” from this new short story collection, was a New Millennium Writings Fiction Award Finalist. Labozzetta is the author of three novels (Sometimes It Snows in America, A Day in June, and Stay With Me, Lella,) and two previous works of short fiction (At the Copa and Thieves Never Steal in the Rain). She is a John Gardner Fiction Book Award Finalist and Pushcart Prize nominee. Her novel, A Day in June, was shortlisted for the 2020 Eric Hoffer Grand Prize Award. Read more about Labozzetta in this Q&A from Boston College Magazine.
Broadcast journalist tells her story
Broadcast journalist Judith Bishop, a member of the Newton College of the Sacred Heart Class of 1962, reflects on her career covering political milestones, breaking news, and the arts in the new book,
An innocent man
In a small Missouri town in 1992, the body of 19-year-old Mischelle Lawless was found in her car, stalled on the side of a road. Joshua C. Kezer was arrested and charged for her murder—and spent the next 16 years of his life in prison. In the new book, The Murder of Angela Mischelle Lawless: An Honest Sheriff and the Exoneration of an Innocent Man (Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2023), 1969 Boston College alumnus Stephen R. Snodgrass writes about how Kezer was imprisoned for a crime he didn’t commit. Snodgrass is an award-winning lawyer who worked to exonerate Kezer and two other men wrongfully convicted of murder. Writing with Kezer, Snodgrass unveils the web of manipulation and corruption that led to Kezer’s conviction. This book has been called “a timely, compassionate work of true crime that calls for better and more equitable justice for all.”
