Sarah Anne is a popular jock with a secret nerdy side in the newest novel by Boston College alumna Erin Dionne. In Secrets of a Fangirl (Arthur A. Levine Books, May, 2019) Sarah Anne lives by a set of rules meant to keep her geek and jock selves separate. But her geek identity threatens to be exposed when she enters a contest about her obsession, the MK Nightshade series. Sarah Anne has to learn how to be true to herself in this book geared for readers ages 8-12. Dionne also is the author of Lights, Camera, Disaster! and Moxie and the Art of Rule Breaking, among other titles.
Secret nerd
Paradigm shift for American Catholics
On July 29, 1968, Pope Paul VI ended years of discussion and study by Catholic theologians and bishops by issuing an encyclical on human sexuality and birth control entitled Humanae Vitae. According to Boisi Center for Religion and American Public Life Director Mark Massa, S.J., the encyclical led to a paradigm shift in American Catholic thought that has had far-reaching repercussions. In his book The Structure of Theological Revolutions: How the Fight Over Birth Control Transformed American Catholicism (Oxford University Press, 2018), Fr. Massa argues that American Catholics did not simply ignore and dissent from the encyclical’s teachings on birth control, but that they also began to question the entire system of natural law theology that had undergirded Catholic thought since the days of Aquinas. He examines the work of theologians, including Monan Professor of Theology Lisa Sowle Cahill, concluding that theology does not develop one step at a time, in a linear fashion, but with large and even sudden shifts of meaning. Read a review of Fr. Massa’s book in the National Catholic Reporter.
The art of bookbinding
A hand-bound book created by John J. Burns Library Conservator Barbara Adams Hebard is on exhibit now through June 29 at the North Bennet Street School’s 20th Annual Celebration of Craft. Hebard designed the cover for a copy of The Holy Bible purchased from Ignatius Press. It is bound in a historic-style known as Stationery or Account Book, a style popular in the 15th century. The cover is in thick hand-made flax paper, decorated with goatskin over-bands tacketed with vellum strips and linen thread. According to Hebard, her goal was to make a sturdy, yet light-weight, book that would be easy to hold and would visually evoke the centuries the printed Bible has been in use. A graduate of the North Bennet Street School’s Bookbinding Program, Hebard has taught book arts workshops for BC students. She is a Fellow of the International Institute for Conservation of Historic and Artistic Works, a Professional Associate of American Institute for Conservation of Historic and Artistic Works, and chairperson of the New England Conservation Association. The 20th Annual Celebration of Craft is on display at the NBSS Windgate Gallery, 150 North Street in Boston.
Posted in BC Libraries, Exhibitions
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Seeing the Spanish Restoration on TV
Televising Restoration Spain: History and Fiction in Twenty-First-Century Costume Dramas (Palgrave Macmillan, 2018) is a collection of essays on recent Spanish television series that are set in the period of the Spanish Restoration (1874-1931). Co-edited by Boston College Assistant Professor of Hispanic Studies Wan Sonya Tang and David R. George, Jr., this volume aims to add depth to the field of global media studies and reinvigorate 19th century Spanish literary and cultural studies by bringing the field into dialogue with contemporary theory on television, film, media, and visual culture. Essays cover topics such as the production of televisual heritage, evolving constructions of gender, and television as historian. Tang talked about the book in a video from BC Libraries.
Exploring the natural philosophists
The History and Philosophy of Science: A Reader (Bloomsbury Academic, 2018) is for students looking to better understand the origins of natural science. Edited by Associate Professor of Philosophy Daniel McKaughan and Associate Professor of the Practice of Philosophy Holly VandeWall, The History and Philosophy of Science brings together seminal texts on astronomy, physics, chemistry, and the life sciences from antiquity to the end of the 19th century and makes them accessible in one volume for the first time. Grouped by topic to clarify the development of methods and disciplines and the unification of theories, The History and Philosophy of Science will enable readers to interpret and critically engage with central problems and ideas from the history and philosophy of science and understand and evaluate scientific material found in a wide variety of professional and popular settings. The editors talked about the book in a video from BC Libraries.
A Montauk summer
In his new memoir, Boston College graduate John Glynn writes about a summer he spent living with friends at the beach on Long Island. Out East: Memoir of a Montauk Summer (Grand Central Publishing May, 2019) is a story of friendships, conflicts, secrets, and epiphanies that blossomed within this tightly woven friend group and came to define how they would live out the rest of their twenties and beyond. Out East has been named a Best Book of May by Entertainment Weekly and Time magazine. Glynn is an editor at Hanover Square Press, an imprint of HarperCollins. He earned a bachelor’s degree in English from BC in 2008.
Book prize for Catherine Mooney
School of Theology and Ministry Associate Professor Catherine Mooney has been awarded the Hagiography Society Book Prize for her publication Clare of Assisi and the Thirteenth-Century Church Religious Women, Rules, and Resistance (University of Pennsylvania Press). Founded in 1990, the Hagiography Society is an organization of scholars in various disciplines whose research involves the study of textual and visual media pertaining to holy men and women. The award citation reads in part: “Through extremely careful attention to philological, contextual, and documentary detail, Mooney is able to pull back the layers of hagiographic ideal that were imposed onto Clare’s official image and often served to erase the actual conditions in which Clare and other women like her lived. Clare of Assisi and the Thirteenth-Century Church, then, is a work of recovery, of restoring forms of women’s religious life in late medieval Italy; it is a model for how scholars of the premodern might seek out marginalized or suppressed presences in our canonical texts.” The prize will be awarded to Mooney this month at the International Congress on Medieval Studies. For more about Mooney’s book, read this 2017 BC Bookmarks post.
The witness of African American religious experience
Knowing Christ Crucified: The Witness of African American Religious Experience (Orbis Books, 2018), a new book by Professor of Theology M. Shawn Copeland, “is a powerful reading of the Cross of Jesus, both as it is written in scripture and in the experience of the poor and oppressed—particularly in the history of black people in America, from the time of slavery up to the present,” according to the publisher. Copeland writes that discipleship calls the faithful to “act in solidarity with all those who suffer social oppression and to join them in the struggle for life and justice.” An award-winning theologian, Copeland also is the author of Enfleshing Freedom: Body, Race, and Being.
Posted in Boston College Authors
Tagged African American history, Catholicism, Theology Department
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The Privately Printed Bible
The Privately Printed Bible: Private & Fine Press Editions of Biblical Texts in the British Isles and North America, 1892-2000 (Oak Knoll Press) by Boston College alumnus Ronald D. Patkus is the first book to offer a broad survey of the history of private and fine press printings of biblical texts. Patkus focuses on English-language examples from the United Kingdom, Ireland, and North America, and includes more than 500 works in his study and more than 100 illustrations that demonstrate the aesthetics of layout, design, and illustration taken up by various presses. The book is divided into chapters that each deal with a specific generation of printers: the Revival, the “Second Generation,” the Postwar Era, and the late 20th century. In his book, Patkus describes key texts, such as the Doves Bible, the Oxford Lectern Bible, the Golden Cockerel Four Gospels, the Spiral Press Ecclesiastes, the Pennyroyal Caxton Bible, and the Arion Press Bible. Patkus received a BA and PhD from from Boston College. He holds the Frederick Weyerhaeuser Endowed Chair in Biblical Literature and Bibliography at Vassar College where he serves as associate director of the libraries for special collections and is a member of the History Department. He previously was head of archives at the John J. Burns Library at Boston College. His volume was reviewed recently by Burns Library Conservator Barbara Adams Hebard for the Guild of Book Workers Newsletter.
Workplace blues
The American workplace has eroded across many dimensions, leaving workers feeling untethered and insecure about their futures, according to a new book by Lynch School of Education and Human Development Professor of Counseling Psychology David Blustein, one of the nation’s foremost experts on the psychology of work. The Importance of Work in an Age of Uncertainty: The Eroding Work Experience in America (Oxford University Press, June 2019) details Blustein’s new research that finds American workers increasingly beset by anxiety and distress wrought by economic trends that have reshaped when, where, how, and how long Americans work to earn both a living and a sense of purpose. Blustein hopes his findings will add a needed psychological perspective to debates and policies about work that thus far have been mainly limited to economic and political considerations. Read more from Boston College Chronicle.
BC Bookmarks 