The Chartwell Press

The Chartwell Press: is a “micro-publisher” located in a small town in Southwestern British Columbia.  I started the company in 2013 after moving on from a liberal arts college that I founded 14 years earlier and where I’d served as president from 1999 to 2011(see the founding story here). The school was a “teaching center” of Trinity Western–Canada’s foremost Evangelical Christian university–and our school was an initiative of Catholic parents who also happened to be TWU Alums.  It was a wonderful cooperative effort; we were located next door to the University, where our Catholic students took some of their subjects at the Evangelical school, and vice versa.  I think both parties learned a lot from each other.

Our First Book:  For my part I discovered that we Catholics can learn something from Evangelicals about being more active laity. This, and encouragement from the Abbot at the nearby Benedictine Seminary, got me interested in promoting Catholic teaching about the lay vocation to my fellow Catholics.  In my search for good teaching resources I discovered an out of print book entitled “Catholic Laity in the Mission of the Church” written by well-known Washington DC-based author Russell Shaw. I asked him for permission to make a few copies of the book for teaching purposes.  He replied, “why don’t you re-publish it?” And that’s how The Chartwell Press was born!

My wife Diane and I attended Sherry Weddell’s highly-regarded “Forming Intentional Disciples” seminar in Colorado Springs that same year and it turns out that she is also a fan of Shaw’s book.  So I asked  Sherry for an endorsement and she graciously authorized the following:

“Russell Shaw’s Catholic Laity in the Mission of the Church is the best, most accessible articulation of the theology and mission of the laity in print. The Catherine of Siena Institute sold hundreds of copies and I was so disappointed when it went out of print.  Many pastors bought it in bulk and used it as the basis for group discussion with their leaders” (Sherry Weddell, Author; Forming Intentional Disciples; Co-Director, Catherine of Siena Institute, Feb 4 2014).

Since re-publishing CLMC we’ve delivered hundreds of copies to the Siena Institute and additional copies to schools like the University of Mary as well as to individuals through Amazon.com, Amazon.ca, and through printings we’ve commissioned locally.  So it’s back in print and you can purchase it here. You can also read the first chapter of the book as a preview right here on this website.

More than Myth? The second thing I learned from working in cooperation with Trinity Western is that when Evangelicals and Catholics work together a synergy often occurs that produces a highly-productive complementarity–multiple perspectives can create an end-product greater than its constituent parts.  And because I have remained in contact with Dr. Robert Stackpole, who was head theologian at the college, I had the opportunity a year after Shaw’s work was released to publish a ground-breaking new book on progressive-creationism that is a product of precisely that synergy.  The book, More than Myth?, was written by some of the world’s leading Evangelical and Catholic theologians, scientists and thinkers, and was edited by Dr. Stackpole and Dr. Paul D. Brown, the latter an Evangelical professor of Chemistry and Environment Studies at Trinity Western (both have chapters in the book as well).  Progressive Creationism (I’ll abbreviate that to “PC” here) is a relatively new explanation that suggests that the Bible’s Book of Genesis–the creation account–and modern science do not contradict each other.  As I understand it, PC proposes that God created the universe out of nothing and then let natural developmental processes take place.  But, says PC, he also intervened by creating human beings and other living things according to their natural kinds, out of nothing, when the natural environment was ready to support them. And, says PC, the scientific evidence is stronger for progressive creation than the evidences used to support evolutionary theory.

Unsurprisingly, this book has generated a lot of controversy, as a look at its Amazon reviews shows.  But I think reviewer Tim Warrington captures the value of the book’s free inquiry  and of the book itself quite well:

“I believe everyone who reads this book will take issue with more than one point of view expressed therein as there are seven writers represented with each tackling difficult controversial topics. In my case it is the views expressed about Neanderthal man on page 83 by one of the other authors. But that writer has a right to present them along with his evidence for same. I suspect his viewpoint on that may not even be shared by all his fellow authors.

“Bottom line, I highly recommend that you add this book to your must-read list.”

Judge for yourself.  You can read the first chapter of More than Myth? here, and it’s available at Amazon.com and Amazon.ca.

The Papacy. The third book to be published by The Chartwell Press is, like the first, a reprint.  It’s an updated version of Dr. Robert Stackpole’s St. Peter Lives in Rome, this time with some minor revisions; a new, more explanatory title (The Papacy: God’s Gift for All Christians); and, most importantly, a built-in chapter-by-chapter study guide which makes it an excellent choice for book study groups (it’s already been used for that purpose in my hometown to good effect).

Dr. Stackpole tells me that he originally wrote the book back in 2004 as an apologetic for the Papacy because there was, to his knowledge, none on the market at the time.  On our reprinting in 2015, it appears that it is still the only in-depth explanation for the office.  I think one of its strengths is that it avoids a polemical tone, but is written rather with the motive of fostering an understanding of the reasons for the Papacy in light of its scriptural and historical foundations.  Stackpole himself wrestled with the legitimacy of the Papacy prior to leaving Anglican Orders for Catholicism, and he describes “the role of Peter” as “his greatest stumbling block” when making that decision.  The Papacy, therefore, is a book that grew out of the personal quest of an unconvinced enquirer, so the investigation is thorough and not inclined to easy conclusions.  In the end, Stackpole calls the Papal Office “God’s Gift for All Christians.”  I suspect that not every Christian will come to the same conclusion.  Nevertheless, for those who want to establish an informed opinion of “the most contentious issue in ecumenical dialogue” (p.4), I doubt you’ll find a more informative treatise.  You can read the first chapter here, and it’s available on Amazon.com and Amazon.ca.

Letters to a College Student. The latest book from The Chartwell Press is subtitled “On the Light of Reason and the Search for Truth.” The writer is, again, Dr. Robert Stackpole.  Robert was born in New York State, earned a B.A. in History from Williams College in Massachusetts in 1982, and a Masters degree in Theology from Oxford University in England in 1988. Robert obtained a Doctorate in Theology from the Pontifical University of St. Thomas Aquinas (the “Angelicum”) in 2000.

As I wrote above, Robert was my head theologian at Redeemer Pacific College.  We worked together there from 2002 to 2011, and he drew great crowds of students to his courses, the most popular being his CS Lewis courses!  The book itself is about:

“A girl named Krystal [who] goes off to university for the first time is immediately dazzled by all the different philosophies, religions, and world-views on display there. What can she make of it all? So she writes to her uncle Robert, the only professional philosopher and theologian that she knows, sharing her struggles at university to find the truth about herself, her world—and her God. And he writes back—again and again. These are his letters.

“[Uncle Robert takes] Krystal on a fascinating tour of the essential wisdom of western civilization, from Boethius, Thomas Aquinas, and Leo Tolstoy to C.S. Lewis, Albert Einstein and John Paul II. Along the way her uncle tackles the New Atheism, the New Age Movement, and other contemporary streams of thought, and he addresses the questions that every mind, young or old, sincerely wants answered: Can we really know anything with confidence? Is there a God who made the universe? What is a human being anyway—do human beings have souls as well as bodies? Is there life after death? Why do innocent people suffer so much? And most of all: what is my heart’s desire, and how can I find it?

“[Letters to a College Student] is an ideal introduction to western philosophy, and its continuing relevance to the questions we ask today. Discover how reason can still light the way in our search for the truth of who we are—and who we are meant to be.

Dr. Robert A. Larmer, Chair of the Department of Philosophy at the University of New Brunswick, writes:

‘Robert Stackpole makes the case that reason, combined with honest investigation, reveals a world that witnesses beyond the possibility of reasonable doubt to the truth of Belief in God. His marshaling of evidence in a cumulative case argument is impressive’.”

Read a free preview, the first chapter of Letters to a College Student HERE.

Purchase Letters to a College Student HERE on Amazon.