My Review of "Encountering Truth"

Pope Francis' Encountering Truth:  Meeting God in the Everyday -- the Morning Homilies from St. Martha's Chapel is an amazing collection of the Holy Father's morning homilies.

Early every morning, Pope Francis celebrates a Mass in the small Saint Martha chapel at the Vatican.  The audience is made up of gardeners, nuns, cooks, office workers, and always changes.  What doesn't change is that the pope gives his homilies without notes just as he did when he was a parish priest.  This book features highlights from almost 200 daily homilies covering a year from March 2013 to May 2014.

I was especially drawn into Antonio Spadaro's introduction which has an in-depth look at how Pope Francis prepares, including what the pope thinks is important in contemplating and conveying the Word of God to the faithful.  Spadaro also gives a survey of the way Francis circles round various topics, engaging them from different angles as the liturgical readings progress day to day.  That was a new idea for me, that to get a full sense of his teachings one must patiently look at them from day to day.

These homilies make excellent devotional readings.  Each of those readings contain surprising inspirational points, and make me look afresh at the biblical text and at spiritual wisdom.  Each homily is brief -- usually only just a couple of pages -- but there's enough in this book to engage readers for a long time to come.

Encountering Truth is a book I definitely recommend.

I received a free copy of this book as part of the Blogging for Books program in exchange for my honest review here.