Acadian House offers 'Southern Jesuit Biographies'

            Acadian House Publishing of Lafayette looks at the Jesuits who lived and worked in the New Orleans Mission and Province over the past three centuries in “Southern Jesuit Biographies: Pastors and Preachers, Builders and Teachers of the New Orleans Province.” The main author is the Rev. Jerome Neyrey, a Jesuit priest who lives in Grand Coteau, and many of the book’s 220 biographies of Jesuit priests and brothers were contributed by the late Rev. Thomas Clancy, also a Jesuit.

The biographies in the book are divided into three groups, three eras in which the men did the bulk of their work: the Mission Era (1700-1907), the Building and Expansion Era (1907-1968) and the Modern Era (1968-2014).

The 256-page volume contains 64 pages of photographs of Jesuit priests and brothers and a map of the 11-state province as well as a map of Ceylon/Sri Lanka, where Southern Jesuits did mission work from the mid-1930s through the 1960s. “Southern Jesuit Biographies” also contains a glossary of terms, an index and a timeline that details events and dates in the establishment of the Jesuits’ New Orleans mission and province.

The book is available through bookstores and gift shops and may be ordered at www.acadianhouse.com or by mail order from Acadian House Publishing, P.O. Box 52247, Lafayette, LA 70505, (800) 850-8851. It retails for $40 plus $4 for shipping.

Louisiana Book News is written by Cheré Coen, the author of “Forest Hill, Louisiana: A Bloom Town History,” “Haunted Lafayette, Louisiana” and “ExploringCajun Country: A Historic Guide to Acadiana” and co-author of “Magic’s in the Bag: Creating Spellbinding Gris Gris Bags and Sachets.” Write her at cherecoen@gmail.com.