3 Rocking Resources for Catholic Brides

I've said it before, and I'll say it again, that one of the best things about the Catholic blogging and writing world is the wonderful people you meet. Today I'm featuring fellow author Stephanie Calis, who wrote the recently released Invited: The Ultimate Catholic Wedding Planner (Pauline, 2016). I'm honored to be an endorser of Stephanie's book and thrilled to give you a peek into how this young mama of two survived launch week, plus links to her book, free eBook, and new image-driven website for Catholic brides!

1. Congrats on the launch of your beautiful book Invited: The Ultimate Catholic Wedding Planner.  How do you feel now that you can actually hold the results of all your hard work in your hands?

Thank you so much!  It's wonderful to hold my own book after three years of working on it.  Pauline Books and Media sent me a box of 20 copies tied together with lace and sprinkled with flowers!  But seeing the actual book is also a little unfamiliar, as strange as that sounds -- I've been so accustomed to sharing the cover image and talking about the content on social media over the last few months, but honestly, it's hard not to flip through and reread what exactly I wrote about certain topics while imagining what people's reactions might be to the way I've presented things.  In that sense, having Invited out there is so exciting, but also makes me feel so vulnerable!

2. What were the highpoints of launch week?

The weeks leading up to the launch felt insane.  My husband Andrew is working towards a PhD in English, and his comprehensive exams, which were 12 hours long and determined whether he'd be eligible for official doctoral candidacy, were two weeks before my book's April 1 release date.  I'd put off a few projects, like writing a supplemental eBook and creating a promotional video, until after the exams so we could prioritize Andrew's studying.  I was glad I could make that sacrifice for my husband, but he didn't really get to relax afterwards because of all the catching up I needed to do!  Even though that was crazy, it made it possible for the actual launch week to be more peaceful, because everything was done.  My favorite project was the eBook, Full of Grace (you can download a copy here), which features meditations for engaged and married couples to pray for each mystery of the Rosary.  Andrew helped, and since the Rosary has been one of our favorite ways to pray together from early on in our relationship, we loved getting to share some of our spirituality and offer marriage-related prayers specifically for couples.

I hadn't really thought to look at my book on Amazon before the release, after which I figured I'd be eager to read reviews and things, and was completely surprised when a few friends told me via Facebook that Invited reached #1 in the category of New Wedding Planners in the week before the release.  Naturally, that felt wonderful, but my prayer after seeing the ranking, and up through now, has been that I might thankful for those quantifiable measures of the book's success, but that at the same time, I can also be appropriately detached from them and focus my prayer on asking the Holy Spirit to bless the couples who will encounter what I wrote, that they might be inspired and challenged to radical love.

3. How did your husband react? And are your kids old enough to understand what's going on?

Andrew is amazing; such a man of praise, awe, and affirmation while somehow still helping me to feel little--that's a good thing!  He's consistently told me how proud he is of me and of my writing, and shows it in his willingness to take over our chores and caring for our kids during deadlines for the book.  Yet he is also so good at reminding me that God, not me, is in control.  As happy as I've been with the experience of writing Invited and working to spread the word and create an exciting release, I've also had so many instances of anxiety about whether I'm doing things right, whether I'm doing it too much for myself, and whether anyone will even care.  Every time I've gotten upset, he lovingly tells me all will be well and tells me to place everything in the Father's hands.  How I need that reminder, and how thankful I am for him.

My son Aaron is two and a half and my daughter Lily is five months, so they don't have a huge sense of what's going on, but Aaron does know that when his mama goes out to do work, it's for writing, and I showed him the book when I got the box in the mail.  He was more interested in the flowers that were in there and ran to put them all in a dump truck.  Perspective.

4. What was it like to work with a publishing house run by religious sisters? Did your editor wear a full habit?

Pauline is run by the Daughters of St. Paul, and their charism is evangelization through the media.  They do wear a full habit, and their joyful spirit was so evident through our correspondence.  My editor, Sr. Marianne Lorraine, particularly impressed me in her ability to critique my work with charity, and to hear out my responses to her suggestions as we worked through the text, also with great patience and kindness.  I worked with several laypeople whom Pauline employs, as well, on things like permissions and marketing.

Even though I'm joyfully married and knew for a long time that I was called to marriage, my friends in college and I used to ask each other what religious order we'd most like to hypothetically join (hashtag Catholic girl problems…).  I used to say I'd want to be in an order that specialized in a handicraft or food product (I'd explain it as "like Mystic Monk coffee, but with nuns"), but maybe after this experience I'd change my answer to an order like the Daughters, so I could write and edit!

5. What's next for you?

Two friends, both Catholic wedding vendors, and I are incredibly excited to launch a new ministry for Catholic brides and newlyweds, Spoken Bride, at the end of this month.  We've been talking for almost a year about the deep need to combine practical wedding advice with awe-inspiring images from beautiful real Catholic weddings.  Our goal is to create a resource that rivals secular wedding sites in beauty and creativity, while also emphasizing the unique truth and richness of our faith. In a major way,

I think planning a nuptial Mass with amazing prayer, music, and your witness as a couple, alongside a reception that's stylish, fun, and creative, lets the beauty of Catholic marriage speak for itself.  It serves as an invitation to your guests, meeting them where they are, drawing them into the sacred, and sparking a desire to share in the authentic freedom and joy experienced by the bride and groom.  We are currently accepting submissions from real weddings, membership in our vendor guide, and written contributions, and would love to feature you!  You can read more about us and our mission here.

How 15 Minutes of Prayer Can Change Your Life

Gary Jansen's book on Ignatian prayer hit the number one spot in its category of Hot New Releases on Amazon within the first week of publication. It was my privilege to interview this fellow Long Islander and senior Penguin Random House editor on behalf of Catholic news site Aleteia.org. Due to word count limitations, the interview on Aleteia needed to be shortened. Here is the original, extended edition.

In The 15-Minute Prayer Solution, author and senior Penguin Random House editor Gary Jansen shows how a commitment to fifteen minutes of daily prayer can awaken a relentless desire to place God at the center of everything. Just as you don’t exercise one day a week and expect to see results, the same is true of prayer. Forming a habit of daily prayer can transform our lives, but many of us need help in developing or deepening that habit. Enter Jansen’s book.

I recently interviewed Jansen about the distinctive Ignatian or Jesuit approach he takes to progressing in the interior life.


1. How can fifteen minutes of prayer a day make a difference in someone's life?

At the heart of the book is a simple premise: there are 1,440 minutes in a day. One percent of that time is 14 minutes and 24 seconds, so roughly 15 minutes. What would happen if you dedicated just one percent of your life every day to God? Would it change your life? I asked myself those questions a few years ago and the answers revolutionized my life. Though I’m Catholic and spend a lot of time in church, I’ve always had a difficult time focusing on prayer. But once I made a deliberate commitment to daily prayer, almost instantly I felt more peaceful, more patient, more aware. Within a short period of time I found that one percent turned into two percent and then three percent and then I would find myself praying throughout the day. I would wake up and the first thoughts I had were about God, thanking God for the morning. Then something else exciting happened. The more time I gave to God, the more I felt God giving me back time. I seemed to have more time to do the things I needed to do in my life, not less. So this book is about deliberately setting aside time, getting back to the basics of prayer and being consistent. You don’t exercise one day a week and expect to see results. It needs to be a daily commitment. The same holds true for prayer.

2. Why did you decide to focus on the Spiritual Exercises of St. Ignatius Loyola?

What I love most about Ignatius’s teaching was the simple idea of searching for God in all things. How can I find God in nature? In my family? In adversity? At work? On the streets? I loved the idea that God was very close and not far away, that I could enter a cathedral of everyday living and be in the presence of God at all times. I focused on the Exercises because I truly love the idea of finding God in all things…in another person, in a paper clip, in science or even in a tattoo.

3. Do you think there's an increased interest in the Jesuit approach to prayer because of Pope Francis, the first Jesuit ever elected to the papacy?

I do. There is a lot of Ignatius in Pope Francis and how he stresses discernment and looking for Jesus in the eyes of the poor and those who struggle. In addition, many people have already been introduced to Jesuit spirituality in the U.S. because of Father James Martin and his books like The Jesuit’s Guide to Almost Everything and My Life with the Saints. He’s a terrific writer, he’s funny, and he has a gift for taking difficult concepts and making them very easy to understand. And he has sold a lot of books. He’s probably the bestselling Catholic writer in the U.S. today.

4. How much does your book draw on your personal prayer life? 

The short answer is a lot. Even though I went to Catholic school for 12 years, I don’t think I ever learned to pray much more than the Our Father and Hail Mary. But some years ago I decided to try a number of different prayer techniques including lectio divina and praying with the imagination (a favorite of Ignatius). How I prayed and what I prayed made its way into the book because of the profound effect on my life. Moreover, I’ve given workshops on a number of these prayer types and received very positive feedback.

5. Have you ever attended an Ignatian retreat? 

Yes, I’ve been on maybe 20 Ignatian retreats over the last 15 years.  When the Jesuits sold St. Ignatius Retreat House in Manhasset  to land developers in 2013, I lost my home away from home. Those retreats brought me closer to Ignatius, Mary and ultimately Jesus. As I like to say: to Jesus through Ignatius, to Jesus through Mary, and to Jesus through all of creation.

6. As a senior editor with Crown Publishing at Penguin Random House, you have edited books by some of the best Catholic authors in existence, including Pope Francis, Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI, Bishop Robert Barron, George Weigel, Colleen Carroll Campbell, Scott Hahn, Cardinal Dolan, Cardinal Wuerl, Archbishop Chaput, Christopher West, Mike Aquilina, and many others. How has this experience informed your writing style?

I feel blessed to have worked with so many great, thoughtful, and intelligent writers, and I learn something new with each book I edit. An editor is a guide, like a shepherd helping to move the book through the wilderness of publication, pointing out when a writer might go astray, being his or her advocate and coach. My style developed through a combination of influences from various great writers, from the simplicity of Pope Francis’s prose to the poetry of Colleen Carroll Campbell’s writing to the logic of Bishop Robert Barron’s arguments. Each book is an education, and I’m so thankful to have been a shepherd for all these authors.

7. Is your book mainly for beginners in prayer or can it also help those looking to deepen their spiritual life?

It’s for both. My desire was to write a modern book about a traditional topic. I had two readers in mind when I wrote it, the beginner and the reader who has been praying all of his or her life. One of my favorite books growing up was The Little Prince, so I tried to write like that -- simply but in a way where the prose has layers of meaning. My hope is that no matter where you are on the spiritual path you’ll find something to make you ponder. For me the book is about returning to the basics, about putting first things first. I offer this book as a prayer to help others on their spiritual journey.

Karee Santos is the founder of the Can We Cana? blog and also has written for Catholic Match Institute, Catholic Digest, National Catholic Register, and CatholicMom.com. Together with her husband Manuel Santos, M.D., she co-authored The Four Keys to Everlasting Love: How Your Catholic Marriage Can Bring You Joy for a Lifetime (Ave Maria Press, 2016). The Santoses designed and taught a pre-Cana marriage preparation course, and they write a monthly marriage advice column on CatholicMom.com called “Marriage Rx.” They also contribute to FAITH magazine’s “Your Marriage Matters” advice column. The couple live in Long Island, New York, with their six children.

Interested in our upcoming Catholic marriage advice book? Sign up here to get our newsletter and a downloadable thank-you gift.

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Listen in to Our First Radio Interview + More Media Appearances!

Manny and I were thrilled to have our first radio interview last Thursday on the Catholic Mompreneurs on Fire radio show, hosted by Christina Weber. As promised to all the CanWeCana-watchers on Facebook, here is a link to the show. Just click and listen!! (The interview segment of the show begins after about 4 1/2 minutes, if you prefer to fast-forward.)

In honor of our foray into radio, I've created a new Media Appearances page on the blog. It includes past web interviews like the one with Sarah Reinhard of CatholicMom for the Tech Talk: Catholic Blogger series. It also tells you where to find us next, like in the September issue of our diocesan magazine, The Long Island Catholic.

If anyone is looking for a speaker on Catholic marriage and family, particularly in local parishes around Long Island, please get in touch via the blog or email me at santoskaree@gmail.com. I'm putting together a series of articles on Pope Francis' upcoming Synod on the Family (Oct. 5-19) and would love to share what I know.

Thanks so much for your support and interest. God bless you all!

The Theology of the Body is More than Sex: Author Interview with Prof. Windley-Daoust

St. Pope John Paul II's general audiences known as the Theology of the Body (or TOB) are "a theological time bomb waiting to go off," according to papal biographer George Weigel. In my role as moderator of the TOB forum on Google+, I've encountered many people's testimonies that reading the Theology of the Body changed their life and often brought them back to the Church. TOB's message that sexuality and marriage are not just good but sacred is a powerful expression of what's best about Catholicism. But TOB was never meant to end there, and recent scholarship has pushed past earlier limits and demonstrated convincingly that TOB actually helps us to answer the eternal questions of what it means to be human beings with human bodies created in the image of God. Prof. Susan Windley-Daoust's recent book The Theology of the Body, Extended: The Spiritual Signs of Birth, Impairment, and Dying, is an important contribution to modern thought on TOB, and she tells us more about her book here in this author interview.

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1. How did you become interested in the Theology of the Body (or TOB)?

My dissertation work in the early- to mid-1990s focused on humanity's creation in the image of God -- basically, a field called theological anthropology.  But I had barely heard of Pope John Paul II's Theology of the Body then. After teaching at the college level for many years, my undergraduate students kept bringing it up and wanting me to go into more depth about it. I finally broke down and began reading some of the material -- first, the secondary material my students were reading, and second, what the Pope actually said in the general audiences where he developed these themes. I was very intrigued and could see the appeal through my students' eyes...and I couldn't stop going back to the audiences. The more I read, the more I realized there was theological work to be done here.


2. How did you get the idea to expand the Theology of the Body out of the realm of marriage and sexuality and into other areas such as childbirth, disability, and dying? 

It just seemed obvious, honestly. The entire first half of the audiences is about what it means to be human, not about marriage in and of itself. And John Paul II himself encouraged theologians to "take it further" in the audiences. Another piece of it for me was that I was in a three-year program discerning a call and preparing to be a spiritual director. So much of the audiences are about how to see God's call for your life, and responding to that gift. Since spiritual directors help people see God's hand in the midst of everyday life, jumping to childbirth, impairment, and dying seemed very natural.

It's interesting to me that in the past year four books have come out attempting to expand and apply the insights of the first half of the audiences to a wider range of primordial human experiences, and three are by women -- my book, Emily Stimson's These Beautiful Bones, and Leah Perrault's Theology of the Body for Every Body. (The fourth is Fill These Hearts by Christopher West.)

3. What is the primary audience for your book? 

It's written as a "readable academic" text, aimed at upper-level undergrad or graduate students who want to study the Theology of the Body. The book would also be appropriate for a class on theological anthropology or systematic theology. It doesn't assume much prior knowledge of the Theology of the Body -- I reprise it a bit in the beginning, and every chapter has an opening summary section. I think if you are interested in TOB, you'll be able to read it.

4. I understand that well-known TOB expert Prof. Janet Smith made a surprise mention of your book in her keynote speech at the Theology of the Body Congress in Philadelphia this past July. Tell us more about that. 

Well, it was a surprise to me! I didn't know she had even read it. It was a very kind and unexpected plug for the work and the argument. I was sitting there in the audience with my mouth on the floor (and people at my table, who I had just met, whispering "hey, isn't that your book?"). I introduced myself to her afterward and she was very gracious and enthusiastic. It means a lot to get that kind of compliment from a person whose work I respect.

5. In your book, you mention briefly that you and your husband adopted a son with cerebral palsy. How did that personal experience influence your thinking on the theology of disability? 

I could talk about this for an hour.... We have five kids, and our fifth child Alex was a gift through adoption. He does have cerebral palsy. But honestly, most of the book was written while we were going through the adoption paperwork for Alex -- we had not met him yet, since he was in Ukraine.

I had initially wanted to do my dissertation on the theology of disability, which is an increasingly thriving school of thought in contemporary theology. My dissertation director talked me out of it, but my interest remained. I saw lots of connections between John Paul II's focus on the vulnerable, the concept of receiving life as a gift, and the theology of disability, so naturally, it came out in the book. But I didn't write this book out of my experience of parenting Alex -- all I can say is that a number of things converged at once that year.

6. What's next for you? 

I've written a draft copy of a more "popular" (that is, not angled to the academic world) book that introduces a spirituality of childbirth influenced by the Theology of the Body.  Kind of like "what to spiritually expect when you're expecting." A publisher is looking at it now. I hope that comes to fruition, because so many women say that giving birth was one of the most spiritually rich moments of their lives, and that deserves to be explored from a theological perspective! I would be interested in doing something similar about a spirituality of dying.

In addition, I'd like to write some academic articles related to TOB. I've also been approached about presenting this material to diocesan pastoral ministers (which would be great, because I love the teaching/retreat mix model and would love to do more of that). But I also have a family of seven, and a full-time job teaching undergraduates theology. They take first priority! So we'll see what happens.

This book is available in hard copy through Amazon and in electronic format through iTunes.

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If you enjoyed this post, we highly recommend:

• Canonizing Two Thoroughly Modern Men: The Gifts of Pope St. John Paul II and Pope St. John XXIII to the Church
• JPII-Style Pre-Cana
• The Perfect Body of the Virgin Mary

So I was having lunch with Jen Fulwiler...

A picture's worth a thousand words, so when I went off to lunch with super-popular author Jen Fulwiler and 7 other lovely ladies I was dead set on getting a picture. Except then I forgot. "You've got to Photoshop something," one of my friends insisted. So with Jen's permission and the guidance of my 9-year-old daughter, I produced this expertly-crafted image, which proves beyond doubt that Jen and I were in the same room on the same day having lunch together. Who says old bloggers can't learn new tricks?

Jen and I lunching together. Clearly.

The reason I forgot a picture was because the conversation was so awesomely distracting. We started off talking about recipes, since women do cook. The equivalent for men would be something like "How 'bout those Mets?" The discussion quickly moved on from the genius of bacon-stuffed deviled eggs to who are you, where do you blog, and what was your favorite part of Jen's new memoir/conversion story Something Other Than God, recently released by Ignatius Press.

Jen was actually in New York as part of a book tour and my friend Nona managed to get Jen and the Ignatius Press publicity people to fit us into the schedule. Cardinal Dolan's office apparently tried to set up a meeting between the Cardinal and Jen, but our luncheon had already been planned. "So he got bumped for you," Jen joked. I was shocked that the Cardinal and Jen weren't already, you know, drinking buddies or something, but Jen explained that the Cardinal's endorsement of her book was handled through assistants. (So that's how it works!)

Jen's next stop after lunch was the Pauline Bookstore in mid-town Manhattan and then on to a talk the next day at the office of First Things, a highly influential journal of religion and public life. Jen expressed some nervousness about whether New York City was really her target audience, musing that she might get a better reception in the suburbs. As if the conversion story she relates in her book, which has been compared to St. Augustine's Confessions, would only be of interest to suburban housewives. Not surprisingly, every single book that Jen brought to her speech at First Things was sold out.

Although Catholic readers are of course her base, Jen strongly wanted to reach outside the Catholic bubble with her book. A conversion story, after all, should convince people to convert, and that won't happen unless non-believers read it. So Jen hired a very secular-minded Jew as her editor to make sure that every anecdote was accessible to Catholics and non-Catholics alike. And atheists are definitely interested in Jen's story of how an atheist found God -- on a day that her personal blog was featured on Reddit.com, which has attracted a large number of young, atheist followers, Jen's blog received over 150,000 hits.

Jen said that she rarely meets Catholics outside of Mass and parish events, and that she wondered how missionaries managed centuries ago while they were surrounded by people ignorant of and even hostile to faith in a Christian God. Sounded like a great idea for a follow-up book to me, but Jen insisted that she was staying focused on her current book and on her husband's new business venture. She definitely won't stop networking, though. She's planning on setting up conferences for Catholic women, first in her home state of Texas and then elsewhere, but she's looking for more mingling than meditation. Catholics, particularly those who are well versed in their faith, have a real need to connect with each other on a personal level, Jen has found. "Like this lunch," she grinned.

Forming these close personal connections helps us realize how many different faces Catholicism can wear. Every Catholic can witness their faith to the world just by remaining totally themselves and totally Catholic. Jen abhors the negative stereotype of a "good Catholic" as being an unappealing and hopelessly out-of-touch woman in a floor-length skirt with bib overalls. "I thought about that when I started to convert, and I realized I just can't do that!" At nearly six feet tall with long red hair and a glamour-girl smile, Jen clearly won't be succumbing to the bib overall look any time soon. But, God willing, she'll be attracting a lot of people to Catholicism with the story of her conversion and her beautiful personal witness.