Mary Cate Schmidt should educate herself better before she goes slamming people like Edward Beck, who has sacrificed alot in his life in order to help others. Maybe she should read his first book, God Underneath, which talks about his own personal struggles including almost losing his mother to a brain tumor. Priests have families, love and issues just like everybody else in this world. Just because they choose a life of service to try to help other people doesn't mean they aren't fully aware, even more so, of the tragedies and injustices of this world. Compassionate people like Edward Beck feel pain just as deeply as anyone. We all have our troubles, some more than others. Anyway, since when does suffering equate to being a better writer and/or a better person...PUH-LEEZ!
Just because this guy is a priest who talks about sex doesn't make him hip even tho he so desperately is searching for meaning somewhere, anywhere, and thinks interviewing people will find it for him. The stories were so lame I could only get thru 2.5 of them. Because he's never had love, he thinks we're all going tear up at the baseball field chat with the deceased fireman's girlfriend or in the locker room with the story ending with a line from his father about whether he's happy the son became a priest vs. a fireman. People who have never been thru anything cannot begin to grasp the depth of hurt, love, loss, agony, and survivalship and proximity to those who have does not make him a good writer, author or authority on those subjects. I don't know what his first book was like but gimme a break. Anyone who's ever had their heart broken in high school has more depth and feeling than he tries to find in this lame excuse for depths he will never find by talking to people. It has to come from within or it just doesn't ring true. Being in the audience of life is no position from which to write from and expect to touch people, unless, of course, those people are in the audience too. Maybe its me but after losing three children, a broken engagement, a near death assault, an annullment I did myself, being a single mom for 9 years on four dollars a month - and that was just my twenties - maybe it's me but that's something to write about. Not his stupid opening "prologue" on a waitress being spiritual or sexy - get in the game and live life for yourself then write about it because the problem with "unlikely ways home" is he never left.
