Visiting Scholar in Catholic Thought: Brian Doyle - 2011

Credo brings an articulate late baby boomer's -- eye view to Catholic life in America. Stories of priests -- holy and cigar-chomping -- odd and wonderful saints, faithful women, homeless drug addicts, bees, hawks, and donkeys, these beautifully crafted essays are filled with wonder and conviction, humility and awe.

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Currently the editor of the award-winning spiritual quarterly Portland Magazine (from Univ. of Portland, OR), Doyle selected and arranged his essays, written over the past 20 years, around six broad themes (e.g., "A Catholic Being," "Grace and Duress," and "Children Are Verbs"). Many of these reflections appeared in popular publications like the American Scholar, Georgia Review, U.S. Catholic, America, and Notre Dame Magazine, but this anthology conveniently gathers some of Doyle's most passionate, transparent, and delightful material. The two- to five-page essays, written from the perspective of a dedicated Catholic, will inspire and entertain readers of all ages and religious backgrounds. From loving stories from the heart of a parent to memories of a Catholic boyhood, these stories will engage the imagination. Recommended for larger public libraries.-John-Leonard Berg, Univ. of Wisconsin Lib., Platteville

Like Dylan Thomas'Under Milk Woodand Sherwood Anderson'sWinesburg, Ohio,Brian Doyle's stunning fiction debut brings a town to life through the jumbled lives and braided stories of its people.In a small fictional town on the Oregon coast there are love affairs and almost-love-affairs, mystery and hilarity, bears and tears, brawls and boats, a garrulous logger and a silent doctor, rain and pain, Irish immigrants and Salish stories, mud and laughter. There's a Department of Public Works that gives haircuts and counts insects, a policeman addicted to Puccini, a philosophizing crow, beer and berries. An expedition is mounted, a crime committed, and there's an unbelievably huge picnic on the football field. Babies are born. A car is cut in half with a saw. A river confesses what it's thinking. . .It's the tale of a town, written in a distinct and lyrical voice, and readers will close the book more than a little sad to leave the village of Neawanaka, on the wet coast of Oregon, beneath the hills that used to boast the biggest trees in the history of the world.

In a collection of seventy-seven brief, headlong, exuberant, passionate essays for teens, Brian Doyle asks us to do as saints past and present do -- to bend our own lives into acts of love, to love everyone at different speeds, including and especially our enemies. Love is the only thing that can save us in the end. Doyle especially wants us to live with the knowledge that saints are not all dead, are not all wild mystics, are not unreachably holy beings set apart from us. Saints are among us -- they are us!

"Every creature on earth has approximately two billion heartbeats to spend in a lifetime. You can spend them slowly, like a tortoise, and live to be two hundred years old, or you can spend them fast, like a hummingbird, and live to be two years old." The heart: it is known as the seat of the soul, the power house of the body, the essence of spirituality. No other bodily organ has so captured the imagination of human beings since the beginning of time.This startling, genuinely unique book moves like a freight train through the scientific, emotional, literary, philosophical, and spiritual understandings of the heart -- from cardiology to courage, from love letters and pop songs to Jesus. The torment of Doyle's own infant son's heart surgery is the thread weaving the strands together, but the wisdom is for every person who seeks a more passionate life, in touch with the heart of God."This wonderful book has two heroes: a small boy with a damaged heart, and a surgeon who knows how to repair the damaged hearts of small boys. Such heroes deserve a gifted poet to sing their songs. Brian Doyle is that poet." -Chet Raymo, author of Climbing Brandon: Science and Faith on Ireland's Holy Mountain