Simon Tugwell

Saint Dominic and the Order of Preachers is a nice, short overview of the life and career of St. Dominic de Guzmán, founder of the Dominican Order. As one might expect there is an emphasis on his public life and how he managed to form the Dominicans from almost nothing with little support and a great deal of opposition. After all, no one had ever had an order dedicated to preaching before. Not to mention the fact that his base of operations was in the middle of a war zone. If you've ever wondered about the man behind the Order of Preachers, but don't want to commit to a large book, this is worth picking up.… (altro)

This was a very readable translation of documents from the first members of the Dominican Order in the thirteenth century. The earliest of these writings were testimonies about the founder (St. Dominic), many of which noted his compassion for others. The majority of the book, though, is the long and carefully argued "On the Formation of Preachers," which defended the idea of itinerant preaching as a vocation. This section still has relevance today. For example, a chapter about "Those Who Withdraw Themselves From Preaching" offers many excuses for why people avoid preachers and church services, then and now. There are also very good illustrations of the concepts: in arguing against "long commentaries on every single detail" of a longer text, the author compares it to "wanting to make a meal out of a cow and preparing one dish from the horns, one from the skin, another from the hoofs, and so on [until] the cow was quite used up. That is not a sensible way to cook." Even non-Dominican preachers could obtain valuable tips about sermon writing and reaching unbelievers from this essay; the one drawback is the constant reliance on the extra-biblical glosses that were popular at that time.

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LT Haiku:

English translations
of early documents of
Order of Preachers.… (altro)