{"id":1440,"date":"2005-10-08T09:04:39","date_gmt":"2005-10-08T09:04:39","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.beliefnet.com\/viamedia\/2005\/10\/just-what-i-need-1.html"},"modified":"2005-10-08T09:04:39","modified_gmt":"2005-10-08T09:04:39","slug":"just-what-i-need-1","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/2005\/10\/just-what-i-need-1.html","title":{"rendered":"Just what I need"},"content":{"rendered":"

Another book to add to the pile next to the couch. But this one, I think I must read…Ghost Empire: How the French Almost Conquered North America<\/a>, reviewed in that link in the Toronto Globe and Mail. <\/p>\n

\n
\n

In Ghost Empire<\/em>, Philip Marchand’s new book about the voyages of the great and peculiar 17th-century French explorer Robert de La Salle, the author doesn’t tell us much that is novel about La Salle. But in recounting the daring explorer’s epic wanderings, Marchand manages to compose an amazingly fresh, surprising take on North American history, French Canada, Catholicism and the author himself, a faintly quixotic character, bookish, erudite and appealing.<\/p>\n

Ghost Empire<\/em> is part history, part travelogue, part memoir and part philosophical meditation on the Catholic religion, modernity and the ironies of progress. The historical narrative follows La Salle on his explorations up the St. Lawrence, through the Great Lakes to the Great Plains, and down the Mississippi to the Gulf of Mexico.<\/p>\n

…<\/p>\n

Marchand’s interest in La Salle isn’t a passing fancy, a book-packaging ploy. By race and religion, he finds himself linked to La Salle, and La Salle’s vast empire, now almost forgotten, is to Marchand an image of the vast, ghostly edifice of the church in the modern world. And this church, Marchand says, in one of those stunning moments of clarity, is not an intellectual system (as modern scholars would have it) but the Body of Christ. As Marchand himself admits, this is not a point of view generally shared even in French Canada these days.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Amazon Canada link<\/a><\/p>\n

Chapters (big Canadian chain) link<\/a><\/p>\n

It’s on Amazon US, but that claims a 3-5 weeks delivery.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Another book to add to the pile next to the couch. But this one, I think I must read…Ghost Empire: How the French Almost Conquered North America, reviewed in that link in the Toronto Globe and Mail. In Ghost Empire, Philip Marchand’s new book about the voyages of the great and peculiar 17th-century French explorer…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":180,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1440","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"yoast_head":"\nJust what I need - Via Media<\/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\/viamedia\/2005\/10\/just-what-i-need-1.html\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Just what I need - Via Media\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"Another book to add to the pile next to the couch. 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The Catholicism comes from her side. Amy grew up in a number of places - Indiana - Washington, DC - Lubbock Texas - Arlington, Virginia - DeKalb, Illinois - Lawrence, Kansas - and Knoxville, Tennessee, where the family settled in 1973. She attended Knoxville Catholic High School, then the University of Tennessee where she majored in history. She received an MA in Church History from Vanderbilt University, where she wrote a thesis on the changing role of women in 19th century American Protestantism, and the ways Scripture was used to justify those changes. She worked as as a teacher in Catholic high schools and a Parish Director of Religious Education and started writing for the diocesan press - the Florida Catholic - in 1988. Amy has written columns for Our Sunday Visitor and Catholic News Service at times over the past twenty years. Her articles have been published in venues ranging from Our Sunday Visitor to the New York Times to Commonweal. She has written 17 books. 18, if you included the as yet tragically unpublished novel. Amy has five children, ranging in age from 26 to 4 and was married to Michael Dubruiel, who died unexpectedly in February 2009. She lives in Birmingham, Alabama.","url":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/author\/awelborn"}]}},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1440","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/180"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1440"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1440\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1440"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1440"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1440"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}