I’ve been honored and blessed to work with Phyllis Tickle on a few books. For those of you who don’t know her, Phyllis was the founding editor of the religion department at Publishers Weekly and is the author of numerous books.

She is perhaps best known for popularizing the Divine Office with her Divine Hours books and for being a sage chronicler of Emergence Christianity, which is also the title of one of her books. I’m doubly blessed to call Phyllis a dear friend.

In honor of her eightieth, I’d like to share one of my favorite publishing-related quotes from Phyllis:

A hot market requires a golden heart and black hands. If the heart gets black because the hands want gold, and book publishers publish only for money without a sense of deep responsibility to the things of God, it is a sin before God and a danger to the rest of us. Those who do religious publishing must do so with introspection, respect and humility.”

–Phyllis Tickle, in an interview with Christian Century, 18 May 2004

You can check out some of Phyllis’s books here.