Books by Joseph Dougherty

Services, thoughts and experiences about being married to the love of my life for 50 years are to be unfolded in these pages. At the beginning of the book, I stated that even after 50 years, it isn't easy. I give advise on how to keep, or on how to be happy in marriage. It entails going to chick flicks even if you don't want to go but because she wants to. Do special things, do not criticize her, and assure her that everything will be OK. Love and understanding are difficult things to hang on to but these pages will hopefully show you that love and commitment will resolve every predicament in 50 years of long and happy marriage.

"She was one of the working stiff actors who made American movies a sort of extended family for me. If I don't do this for her, who will?"Memory and movies collide when the narrator of Comfort and Joi, award-winning screenwriter Joseph Dougherty's imaginative blend of fiction and film fact, sets out to document the life and work of bosomy blonde bombshell Joi Lansing, a minor glamour girl who appeared in such "classics" as Hillbillys in a Haunted House and Queen of Outer Space.Alone in a borrowed house on the California coast during a winter weekend, he indulges his fascination with the pin-up who rose from extra girl to work with Orson Welles, only to end her career in grade-z horror pictures.Offbeat movie history from the fringes of Hollywood triggers haunting personal memories as he follows this "beautiful beacon in a Sargasso of bad filmmaking" and finds an unexpected path to his own past."Dougherty is a humanist who argues that each of us has to look, listen, choose, and commit. His work is as encouraging as it is enlightening."--Douglas Heil, Prime-Time Authorship

From Altar-Throne to Table: The Campaign for Frequent Holy Communion in the Catholic Church investigates what the celebrated scholar of liturgy Robert A. Taft, SJ, calls the greatest and most successful liturgical reform in Catholic history. Only a century ago, faithful, practicing Catholics received Holy Communion only once a year; now, among American English-speaking Catholics, Holy Communion is a routine, weekly devotional practice. This book explains how and why this ritual sea-change happened. This book emphasizes that significant ritual change may occur while liturgical texts remain the same, and it also proposes a method for understanding the causes for such a ritual change. It admonishes not to project current ritual practice into even our recent past. Further, it implies an explanation for the massive decline in Catholics' use of the sacrament of reconciliation.