You might think I should be thrilled—after all, it has been a very long time in the making—but now that it is here and in my hands, I have this queasy feeling. I am speaking about that book project with St. Mary’ Press I have been chatting about from time to time. It was two years ago that the Bible Projects Editor came to see me and pitched the idea that with my academic background and parish experience I would be the right person to write a book for them. Why me? Well, people he knew … knew people who knew me, and somewhere along the line it was suggested that I might have the brains and the style to answer young peoples’ questions about the Bible and our faith.

I do so a lot of answering questions—both in formal studies and individually as students come wanting to know if they really did hear their parents or teachers right when they said “X” or “Y” about Catholicism. More often than not it seemed to me, they hadn’t heard it right … that faith is much more open, nuanced, and (yes) more exciting than they had remembered. Most of us pick up some central religious tenants when we are very young, at a time when our vocabulary is limited, our ability for abstract thinking non-existent, and our way of looking at life very one-dimensional. The problem comes in when we don’t revisit these grounding principles using the brains of your average middle-schooler (or, dare I hope, even later with the brains of an adult!). That’s where people get such fruity ideas that God is an old man with a gray beard, that science and religion are on a collision course, that Catholics are cannibals in thinking the eucharist is the Body and Blood of Jesus, that the end of the world is slated for the October 23^rd, and the like.

The book is called [eye-catching main title] “I’m Glad You Asked:” [explanatory sub-title] “60 Common Questions Catholics Have about the Bible.” Actually that only covers the first two-thirds of the book. The last twenty questions are the kinds of things that Protestants (well, and even many young Catholics) have about the Catholic faith. The answers are brief (the assignment was that each answer could take no more than 3,000 characters—including spaces!) and breezy (we are talking high school aged people. There are just 113 pages of text, but no pictures (well, except for the postage-stamp snapshot of yours truly on the back cover). They will charge you $12.95 in a bookstore. I’m selling them for $10.00 each; slightly less if you promise only to say good things about it to my face.