{"id":46,"date":"2008-07-16T07:43:38","date_gmt":"2008-07-16T07:43:38","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.beliefnet.com\/pontifications\/2008\/07\/summer-reading-a-cant-miss-sug.html"},"modified":"2008-07-16T07:43:38","modified_gmt":"2008-07-16T07:43:38","slug":"summer-reading-a-cant-miss-sug","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/pontifications\/2008\/07\/summer-reading-a-cant-miss-sug.html","title":{"rendered":"Summer reading: A can’t miss suggestion"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Uwem<\/span>In my humble opinion, at least–the suggestion would be “Say You’re One of Them,”<\/a> a collection of short stories from Uwem Akpan, a Jesuit priest from Nigeria who is, remarkably and courageously, teaching at a seminary in Zimbabwe, at least as of this writing. If he emerges from that hellhole, he’ll undoubtedly have lots more material. But according to this NYTimes profile<\/a>, Father Akpan has plenty already:<\/p>\n

In 2004, when the Rev. Uwem Akpan applied to the graduate program in creative writing at the University of Michigan, his folder attracted a lot of attention. He was both a Nigerian and a Jesuit priest, and the program was unused to applicants from either category. And though Father Akpan’s talent was abundantly evident, if a little raw, Eileen Pollack, the director of the program, recalled recently, there was some hesitation on the part of the admissions committee. “There were discussions about having a priest be part of workshops where students would be writing about sex and drugs,” Ms. Pollack said. But in the end Father Akpan was admitted, and he endeared himself, Ms. Pollack recalled, by showing up on the first day of class wearing a University of Michigan sweatshirt. “Everyone loved him,” she said. “It turned out he had had more experience of the dark side of the world than all the other students put together.”<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

\"Say<\/span>Akpan’s book is getting great notices, and one suspects that it is in part because he is a 37-year-old priest, a Jesuit no less, from Africa. (Although Janet Maslin’s Times review was so flat it read like a sneaky bit of backlash.) That curio factor certainly must feed into my fascination, as well as my affection for things Jesuitical. But all that is forgotten when you read his stuff. And when pros in the know read his stuff. Check out the intro anecdote to this Tablet profile<\/a>:<\/p>\n

Getting a short story published in The New Yorker is notoriously difficult. Thousands are submitted, a few considered, still fewer make the grade; even the most famous names in modern writing consider themselves lucky to get a story accepted by the magazine. So, in 2005 when James Martin SJ, associate editor of America magazine, was approached by his fellow Jesuit the Nigerian Fr Uwem Akpan for some advice as to where to publish a short story, he suggested The New Yorker but with little hope of his success. A year later, Fr Martin received what he later described as “the most surprising message I’ve ever read”. It turned out that not only had Fr Akpan’s story been accepted but that he had refused The New Yorker’s request to cut it from 30 to 14 pages – and they had agreed to run it in full. Fr Martin remembered: “His friends and professors at the University of Michigan, where he was completing his Master’s degree in writing, were horrified. ‘You said that you didn’t want them to edit it? You can’t say that to The New Yorker!'”<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Ah, but he did, and I remember reading “An Ex-Mas Feast” and being struck by it even before I knew the author or his bio. And the New Yorker came back for more, recently running a one-page true story from Father Akpan, one of a series of essays in the issue under the rubric of “Faith and Doubt.” Akpan’s is titled “Communion,”<\/a> and it is a gem which, apart from an affecting story, is I think a useful counterpoint to some of the “wafer war” rhetoric in the U.S. church these days.
\nNB: I edited the Tablet excerpt above to reflect the fact that it was Fr. James Martin, not Fr. Torrens, whose story was related. The Tablet is also in the process of correcting the error.<\/strong><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

In my humble opinion, at least–the suggestion would be “Say You’re One of Them,” a collection of short stories from Uwem Akpan, a Jesuit priest from Nigeria who is, remarkably and courageously, teaching at a seminary in Zimbabwe, at least as of this writing. If he emerges from that hellhole, he’ll undoubtedly have lots more…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":128,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2,6,4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-46","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-catholic","category-church","category-pop-culture"],"yoast_head":"\nSummer reading: A can't miss suggestion - Pontifications<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/pontifications\/2008\/07\/summer-reading-a-cant-miss-sug.html\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Summer reading: A can't miss suggestion - Pontifications\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"In my humble opinion, at least–the suggestion would be “Say You’re One of Them,” a collection of short stories from Uwem Akpan, a Jesuit priest from Nigeria who is, remarkably and courageously, teaching at a seminary in Zimbabwe, at least as of this writing. 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He came by all those vocations by accident, or Providence, during a longer-than-expected sojourn in Rome in the 1980s. Gibson began his journalistic career as a walk-on sports editor and columnist at The International Courier, a small daily in Rome serving Italy's English-language community. He then found a job as a newscaster and writer across the Tiber at the English Programme at Vatican Radio, an entity he describes as a cross between NPR and Armed Forces Radio for the pope. The Jesuits who ran the radio were charitable enough to hire Gibson even though he had no radio background, could not pronounce the name \"Karol Wojtyla,\" and wasn't Catholic. Time and experience overcame all those challenges, and Gibson went on to cover dozens of John Paul II's overseas trips, including papal visits to Africa, Europe, Latin America and the United States. When Gibson returned to the United States in 1990 he returned to print journalism to cover the religion beat in his native New Jersey for two dailies. He worked first for The Record of Hackensack, and then for The Star-Ledger of New Jersey, winning the nation's top awards in religion writing at both places. In 1999 he won the Supple Religion Writer of the Year contest, and in 2000 he was chosen as the Templeton Religion Reporter of the Year. Gibson is a longtime board member of the Religion Newswriters Association and he is a contributor to ReligionLink, a service of the Religion Newswriters Foundation. Since 2003, David Gibson has been an independent writer specializing in Catholicism, religion in contemporary America, and early Christian history. His work has appeared in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Fortune, Boston Magazine, Commonweal, America, The New York Observer, Beliefnet and Religion News Service. He has produced documentaries on early Christianity for CNN and other networks and has traveled on assignment to dozens of countries, with an emphasis on reporting from Europe and the Middle East. He is a frequent television commentator and has appeared on the major cable and broadcast networks. He is also a regular speaker at conferences and seminars on Catholicism, religion in America, and journalism. Gibson's first book, The Coming Catholic Church: How the Faithful are Shaping a New American Catholicism (HarperSanFrancisco), was published in 2003 and deals with the church-wide crisis revealed by the clergy sexual abuse crisis. The book was widely hailed as a \"powerful\" and \"first-rate\" treatment of the crisis from \"an academically informed journalist of the highest caliber.\" His second book, The Rule of Benedict: Pope Benedict XVI and His Battle with the Modern World (HarperSanFrancisco), came out in 2006 and is the first full-scale treatment of the Ratzinger papacy--how it happened, who he is, and what it means for the Catholic Church. The Rule of Benedict has been praised as \"an exceptionally interesting and illuminating book\" from \"a master storyeller.\" Born and raised in New Jersey, David Gibson studied European history at Furman University in South Carolina and spent a year working on Capitol Hill before moving to Italy. He lives in Brooklyn with his wife and daughter and is working on a book about conversion, and on several film and television projects.","url":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/pontifications\/author\/dgibson"}]}},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/pontifications\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/46","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/pontifications\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/pontifications\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/pontifications\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/128"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/pontifications\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=46"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/pontifications\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/46\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/pontifications\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=46"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/pontifications\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=46"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/pontifications\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=46"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}