Teilhard de Chardin said many odd things, but when he said “Joy is the infallible sign of the presence of God” he had certainly hit on a profound truth. A joy that is not just a reflection of momentary emotional happiness, but a joy of reflective of living the Gospel despite what you currently feel. A new book that reflects that is Choosing Joy: The Secret of Living a Fully Christian Life by Dan Lord.

This book makes for absorbing spiritual reading. Dan Lord does not set out to give pat answers to the difficult and painful questions of life, but to write on the joy of the Christian life that takes in the reality of life. While this book has some conversion story aspects to it, it is much more than that and the author uses his own conversion as a framework to write about joy. The book starts on the story of his father’s difficult life of a child in the slums of Atlanta and his conversion to the Catholic faith and an experience of joy that stayed with hims throughout his life. Dan Lord’s own reversion to the faith took a detour through years as a frontmen for a touring rock group.

What I most liked about this book was both the presentation and the solid advice given. The writing is engaging and references the great Catholic spiritual writers from the past to the modern day. Part of the format of this book is looking at specific use cases such as dealing with some general obstacles to growing in the spiritual life. Specific examples and common objections are given in regard to this. These examples and advice lead up to how you can abandon yourself to God’s will and how the sacramental life of the Church, especially the Eucharist, is necessary in this regard.

Being able to write in a popular style on the faith without making the advice rather shallow can be rather difficult. Platitudes are common in that style of writing, but this book shows the depth of the faith and does not draw back from hard truths. At 144 pages this is a short read, but the impact this book can make is not short.

Jimmy Akin put out an ebook last year without publicity that he wrote on the lark. That ebook concerned a study of papal names and was simpply called “Pope Names” which describes itself as “The Definitive Guide to the History of Papal Naming, Why Popes Choose the Names they Do, and What Name the Next Pope will Choose.” This ebook is rather timely now.

I read it last night and found it a very informative and interesting read. While part of the history of pope names and why popes choose their names I was somewhat familiar with, there were a lot of details I was unaware of. Jimmy’s analytical mind has taken a lot of information and presented it in an accessible way. A book on pope names could sound rather boring, but this is far from that. There are some very interesting repercussions concerning how papal names have been chosen throughout history and how it developed. For example it is mostly in the last millennium where popes choose to go by a regnal name instead of their own name.

The analysis goes into details such as what names have been chosen most and how far a pope will reach back for a papal name. In more recent time we have more explicit information on why a particular pope choose a particular name since they announced their reasoning. Still we can discern plenty of trends and specific reasons why popes choose their names in the past and this book goes through those various reasons.

As for what name the next pope will choose, this book does not intend to narrow that down to just one prediction. He was weighted various names and given his prediction as a percentage of likelihood. I believe most of this analysis makes good sense as for example the pretty-much zero chance of the next pope taking on the name “Innocent”. It will be quite interesting to see how his more heavily weighted selections will turn out.

This book is a quick and enjoyable read and includes several appendices with of course lists of both chronological and alphabetical pope names, along with, for example ,lists of most popular pope names. There is even a list of Antipopes.

Now despite Jimmy’s predictions I am certain the next pope will be Zosimus II. Well maybe not.

Since the requirement for election as a pope is to be a baptized male, during interregnums is is fun for Catholic males to think about what their regnal name would be if selected. If selected I will of course choose Hilarius II and I would be 2 Hilarius.. How could I resist such a pun. Besides the first Pope Hilarius is a saint.

You can get this book from a variety of online stores Kindle/iBooks/Nook via this page.