Column Still challenging readers and changing hearts
By TIM UNSWORTH
Mike Leach has a peddlers
optimism and a knack for the over-the-top metaphor. But the executive director
of Orbis Books gets away with it because he can make a case for it.
Orbis Books is the Don Quixote of religious book
publishing, he said in an article for Maryknoll magazine.
When Don Quixote looked at Aldonza, the outcast, he saw the princess,
Dulcinea. Orbis Books looks at the Aldonzas of this world and sees the face of
Christ.
Orbis (the word means world) is 30 years old this
year. During a period when publishers have bellied up or merged almost as fast
as computer companies, Orbis has maintained a steady pace of some 50 titles
each year and still has 410 active titles in its catalog. Orbis seems to
attract authors who value the cachet of a publisher that succeeds on the thin
line between theology and the world -- just where the church and its people
should be.
Orbis first books gave many official church policy setters a
case of heartburn. Suddenly, books by people whose names were difficult to
pronounce appeared from countries not known for addressing controversial
issues. Pivotal writers such as Gustavo Gutierrez, Lucian Legrand and Ernesto
Cardenal were being translated into English and were proclaiming a philosophy
that became known as liberation theology. A little later, Jean-Bertrand
Aristides thoughts would appear together with a biography of the revered
Dom Helder Câmara -- all of this three decades ago when such theologies
were virtually unknown. In 1978, John Paul II would be elected pope and, soon
after, liberation theology would be declared suspect. But Orbis stuck to its
theological, moral and social vision, and the books continued to change
hearts.
In reality, Orbis Books has been an ongoing journal of what the
church can be. Recently, Christianity Today, a Protestant publication,
selected 100 of the most significant books of the recently ended 20th century.
Three of them bore the Orbis logo, a remarkable number for a publishing house
in business for only 30 years. In addition, the International Bulletin of
Missionary Research has highlighted 51 Orbis titles among the top 150
during the past decade, and Pax Christi has given Orbis four of it past eight
awards. The Catholic Book Awards has given them seven first place awards in the
category of spirituality in the past decade.
Orbis ancestral roots could be said to date to 1911 when
Frs. James Anthony Walsh and Thomas Frederick Price, two diocesan priests,
formed the Catholic Foreign Mission Society of America. Father (later Bishop)
Walsh was the director of the Propagation of the Faith in Boston, which edited
The Field Afar, a small mission magazine that later became
Maryknoll magazine. Price was a veteran home mission priest from North
Carolina. The American hierarchy approved their plan to go to China, and, in
the years that followed, the image of the pith-helmeted missionary on his
motorcycle captured the imagination of thousands of young men. By 1920, women,
some of whom had helped put The Field Afar together, formed the
Maryknoll Sisters out of a rib of the Dominican Sisters.
The first book under the Orbis logo appeared in October 1970. It
was titled Violence of a Peacemaker: A Life of Don Helder Câmara
by José de Broucker. It appeared under the founding directorship of the
late Philip Scharper, earlier an editor at Sheed & Ward, and Fr. Miguel
DEscoto, a Maryknoll priest who later achieved some fame during his years
as a cabinet official in the Nicaraguan government under Sandinista leader
Daniel Ortega.
Orbis has also done cutting edge books by Ernesto Cardenal and by
Jean-Bertrand Aristide, former president of Haiti, but only a fraction of the
publishers supple output deals exclusively with liberation issues.
Orbis remains intent upon amplifying the voices of the poor. Early
efforts were largely confined to the experience of struggling Christians in the
Third World. In the words of Robert Gormley, former executive director,
Our purpose was not so much to comfort the afflicted but to afflict the
comfortable.
In 1973, Orbis published A Theology of Liberation: A New Look
at Scripture through the Eyes of the Poor, by Peruvian priest Gustavo
Gutierrez. This book joined The Missionary Movement in Christian History
by Andrew Wall and Transforming Mission by David Bosch as the three
Orbis books on Christianity Todays Hall of Fame list.
Gutierrezs book is still selling -- and persuading.
Gradually, Orbis has evolved into publishing Hispanic, black,
Native American and feminist theologies as well as books on mission,
evangelization and spirituality. More important, there is virtually no chaff on
the floor of its warehouse. Most of its words are lucid, challenging, nurturing
and inspiring.
Before Vatican II, there were about a dozen Catholic publishers,
most of whom published intensely edifying books that bore an imprimatur
(it may be printed), given by a bishop, or an imprimi potest
(same meaning but required for religious who wrote) and a nihil obstat
(nothing hinders it), given by a church censor. Such permissions
often took longer than an annulment and were just as arbitrary. The need to be
vetted scared away uncounted authors. This need was another result of the
anti-Modernist syndrome that lowered Catholic IQ and made the church the object
of intellectual ridicule.
Today, the Catholic Book Publishers Association has at least 80
members. Member publishers now get submissions from clergy, religious and the
laity, some of whom are among the 8,000 members of the American Academy of
Religion, or the 1,100 in the Catholic Theological Society of America, or the
900 in the College Theology Society. Hundreds of manuscripts arrive on
editors desks, replete with floppy discs that can be edited, corrected
and typeset in less time than a bishop could give his imprimatur.
Twelve percent of the 63,000 books published in the United States
each year -- about 7,500 -- are about some aspect of religion. The secular,
deep-pocket publishers are also in the market. Although they tend to publish
largely inspirational New Age books, they can attract Catholic authors who are
on the celebrity circuit and who are so well known that publishing simply
serves to extend their reach.
Orbis is often left with difficult choices. Thus, Legrands
Unity and Plurality: Mission in the Bible sold only 1,000 copies, while
Fr. Henri Nouwens With Burning Hearts sold 50,000. Both are Orbis
books. Both are books of substance. Quality publishers must not only adhere to
their mission but also be willing to produce a quality book that will likely
lose money.
Competition is keen. Computers have made shelf-stocking clerks
ruthlessly efficient. If a book doesnt move after about four months, it
is often removed and returned. Regrettably, shelf life of a book is often
shorter than an NBA season.
Orbis uses direct mail but, like other publishers, gets only about
a 1 percent return on its mailings. In an increasingly reactionary church,
diocesan papers review few if any books, lest they fail to meet the approval of
the bishop. Most book advertising is confined to the backs of the books
themselves or to publications like NCR, America or
Commonweal. Telemarketing and Internet sales are increasing.
Some publishers connected with religious congregations now permit
downloading of materials via computer in exchange for a donation. Still others
enjoy subsidies from their congregations or outright gifts from interested
benefactors, much as university presses do. Upselling -- that is, offering
additional related books at an additional discount -- has increased
significantly.
Editor-in-Chief Robert Ellsberg has been at Orbis since 1987.
He is our conscience, says Leach. (Yes, hes the son of Daniel
Ellsberg, who provided the Pentagon Papers to The New York Times in
1971.) Robert Ellsberg is primarily responsible for sustaining Orbis
character as it evolves into publishing interreligious dialogue, womens
studies, ecology, Biblical studies and modern spirituality, as well as some of
the old masters. A graduate of Harvards Divinity School with a
masters in theology, he is a convert to the church, who discovered Orbis
on the bookshelves of Dorothy Days Catholic Worker, where he
worked as editor.
Orbis is attentive to the church of the future,
Ellsberg said. We have an advantage over other publishers who see only
American culture and whose service to the church only emphasizes one
area.
One example of Orbis reach is its Modern Spiritual Masters
Series -- a litany of great authors, such as Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Simone Weil,
Teilhard de Chardin, Charles de Foucauld, Anthony de Mello and Thomas
Merton.
We look for old things that can be applied anew,
Ellsberg continued. There is a tremendous hunger for stories of saints
and the spiritual disciplines of the past. But were still doing some
liberation theology each year to let people know that there are people
suffering.
Tim Unsworth writes from Chicago where he works in a monstrance
factory. You can e-mail him at unsworth@megsinet.net
National Catholic Reporter, September 29,
2000
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