Catholic Bible Stories: From the Old and New Testaments
Josephine Van Dyke Brownson · 1923
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Josephine Brownson never lets a Bible story end when the story ends. She tells the flood, and then has the child kneel down that night and go over his day for what he did wrong. She tells the Last Supper, and then says plainly that the Apostles made their First Communion in that room and that the child will make his own. Eve coaxing Adam becomes a word about the boy who coaxes other boys into bad words. Every chapter is turned, on purpose, toward the child’s own soul, which is the thing a parent wants and seldom gets.
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Thirty-two short chapters run from the making of the world to Pentecost. The Old Testament half runs from Adam and Eve through Noah, Abraham, Joseph and David to Judith, Job, Jonah and Daniel. The New Testament half tells the life of Christ from the cave at Bethlehem to the empty tomb, and after the Ascension it teaches the faith outright: what baptism does, what a mortal sin is, what hell and purgatory are, how to go to confession (down to “Bless me, Father, for I have sinned. This is my first confession.”), what happens at Mass, and the little door in the altar where Jesus waits all day. It ends at Pentecost and the child’s own Confirmation.
The voice is warm and blunt. She softens nothing, hell included, and she talks to the children in front of her (“Joe looks hungry”), so it reads aloud as it was meant to. Thirty plates by Doré, Bouguereau, Hofmann and others go with the stories.
The first page of Where the World Came From
Chapter I
Where the World Came From
Make yourselves comfortable, for we are going on a long journey. We are going back thousands of years, before the first man had been made; farther still, before the first animal had been made. The earth was then covered with forests. Not a bird twittered, not a fly buzzed. There was no noise but the noise of thunder and rushing water, the noise of wind and tumbling rocks. Farther still, when not a tree, not a bush, not a blade of grass had started. Farther still, before the earth or the moon or the sun or the stars or anything else had been made. There was not even any air. There was not even anything to make things out of. Then how did the sun and the moon and the earth ever get here?
Joe looks hungry. Suppose that when he goes home he sits on the floor in front of the oven and waits for a nice chocolate cake to come out.
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Edition and sources
Edition
- Source edition
- Catholic Bible Stories from the Old and New Testaments, Chicago, Extension Press, 1923
- This edition
- Manualist Press, September 2026
- Paperback
- 129 pages, 6 × 9 inches, ISBN 9798173070852
- Hardcover
- 129 pages, 6 × 9 inches, ISBN 9798173070920
- Kindle
- ASIN B0HJ9S4K8V
- Plate
- Rembrandt, Christ Preaching (La Petite Tombe), about 1657. Metropolitan Museum of Art.
Set from the Extension Press edition, Chicago, 1923, with its nihil obstat and the imprimatur of Archbishop Mundelein, the preface by Francis C. Kelley, and all thirty plates. Names keep their old Catholic forms, Noe for Noah and Jonas for Jonah.
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