Saint Francis of Assisi is quite possibly the most popular of all Christian saints. Perhaps it is his adoration for all living things or his unrelenting generosity that has made so many people open their hearts to him. Perhaps it is the deep conviction and piety expressed not only by the saint himself, but in his name, in the Franciscan orders throughout the centuries.Whatever the reason, in a world that is quickly developing in a direction diametrically opposite to the saint's own simple asceticism, Saint Francis of Assisi still stirs strong emotions and compassion. How close he found God, in the very nature around him, is inspiring.All books in The Life and Prayers series come complete with a Touch-or-Click Table of Contents, divided by each section. Enjoy.

    Why wouldn't she be? She made good money as a programmer at a hot tech start-up, had just married a guy with a stack of Ivy League degrees, and lived in a twenty-first-floor condo where she could sip sauvignon blanc while watching the sun set behind the hills of Austin. Raised in a happy, atheist home, Jennifer had the freedom to think for herself and play by her own rules. Yet a creeping darkness followed her all of her life. Finally, one winter night, it drove her to the edge of her balcony, making her ask once and for all why anything mattered. At that moment everything she knew and believed was shattered. Asking the unflinching questions about life and death, good and evil, led Jennifer to Christianity, the religion she had reviled since she was an awkward, sceptical child growing up in the Bible Belt. Mortified by this turn of events, she hid her quest from everyone except her husband, concealing religious books in opaque bags as if they were porn and locking herself in public bathroom stalls to read the Bible. Just when Jennifer had a profound epiphany that gave her the courage to convert, she was diagnosed with a life-threatening medical condition--and the only treatment was directly at odds with the doctrines of her new-found faith. Something Other Than God is a poignant, profound and often funny tale of one woman who set out to find the meaning of life and discovered that true happiness sometimes requires losing it all.

    Don’t just read the words of the Bible ... understand them. The Great Adventure Bible makes the complexity of reading the Bible simple. The narrative approach gives the big picture of salvation history and shows how everything ties together. This is the only Bible that incorporates the The Great Adventure’s color-coded Bible Timeline learning system, a system that has made The Great Adventure Bible study resources the most popular and influential in the English speaking world. The color-coded tools make it easy to read and easy to remember. This is a game changer. There has never been another Bible like it. How you’ll learn... Color-coding for easy reference. Uses the popular Bible Timeline system that’s used by hundreds of thousands of Catholics to learn the Bible Articles to help you understand the overarching story and important covenants that tie the entire Bible together. Key event callouts to help you quickly identify important points in the Bible that ordinarily take readers a long time to find and categorize in their head. Detailed charts giving a visual overview of important characters, key events, maps, major covenants, and historical context. Newly Designed Full-Color Maps to help visualize Bible story locations. This Bible, beyond all its teaching features, is a complete Revised Standard Version – Second Catholic Edition Get the Bible that will help guide you through it. Understand Key Catholic Themes. Add this new weapon to your Catholic spiritual arsenal. Features A full-color Bible with a beautiful eye-catching design Each book of the Bible is color-coded with printed tabs, indicating where it belongs within The Bible Timeline. Twelve Timeline charts provide a visual overview of the Bible, including: important characters, Key Events, geography, major covenants, world rulers, and contemporary events in secular his

    But today, as our culture’s moral center continues to fly apart and with every form of deviance publicly aired and celebrated, we have no choice but to equip our kids to understand and to own the truth about such issues. In Made This Way: How to Prepare Kids to Face Today’s Tough Moral Issues, Leila Miller and Trent Horn give parents (guardians and teachers, too!) crucial tools and techniques to form children with the understanding they need—appropriate to their age and maturity level—to meet the world’s challenges. Their secret lies in an approach that begins not with the Bible or Church teaching but with the natural law. In kid-friendly ways, Miller (Primal Loss) and Horn (Persuasive Pro-Life) help you communicate how the right way to live is rooted in the way we’re made. God’s design for human nature is a blueprint or owner’s manual for moral living that any child can grasp through reason and apply to modern controversies over sex, marriage, life… and the quest for human fulfillment. Topics covered include: • Sex Outside of Marriage • Same-Sex Marriage • Divorce • Contraception • Abortion • Reproductive Technologies • Modesty • Pornography • Transgenderism • Homosexuality Silence can no longer be an option. If we’re not teaching our children how to understand tough moral issues, then the world will.

    Is Catholicism inherently Anti-Semitic? Do the Hebrew Scriptures accurately predict Jesus of Nazareth as the Messiah? How does Jewish thinking presuppose devotion to Mary? Is the Catholic Church a fulfillment of historic Israel? How did the Israelite identity of the twelve Apostles influence the early Church? How do Jewish water rituals relate to Catholic baptism? Is the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass a Passover meal? Should the Catholic priesthood conform to the priesthood established by Moses? How has the Jewish Temple influenced traditional Christian architecture? Does the Pope wear a yarmulke? These and other questions are answered in this book.?

    Says, \"Impregnate yourself with humility, and you will soon find that all other virtues will follow without any effort on your part.\" A treasure; filled with insights. Buy copies with confidence for all your friends!

    Teresa of Avila, St. John of the Cross, St. Francis de Sales, St. Charles Borromeo, St. Vincent de Paul, and St. Rose of Lima; and The Sinner's Guide (along with The Book of Prayer and Meditation) is one of his two most famous and most popular books.St. Teresa of Avila stated that this work of Venerable Louis converted over 1,000,000 souls in her day. She, along with St. John of the Cross, St. Francis de Sales, St. Charles Borromeo, St. Vincent de Paul, and St. Rose of Lima, all counted it among their favorite spiritual books."We are all destined to one or the other," says Ven. Louis, "either to reign eternally with God in Heaven or to burn eternally with the devils in Hell." This inescapable fact is vividly brought to life on every page of this masterfully written book. Utterly realistic with regard to the ultimate end of human life, Venerable Louis of Granada presents here the Four Last Things: Death, Judgment, Heaven and Hell - even rehearsing with the reader the day of his death and the moment of his judgment. His description of the despair in Hell will shake loose any desire, by even the most hardened sinner, to persevere in sin. Man's classic excuses, such as planning to convert later and the difficulty of practicing virtue, are thoroughly demolished. Moreover, Ven. Louis shows how the sinner's life, because of his gnawing conscience, is a continual torment to him even while still on this earth. Whereas, the practice of virtue brings the wonderful promise of Heaven, plus the beautiful joy of a clear conscience, and the many other marvelous advantages of holiness -even here in this life! The Sinner's Guide is a book of crystal clarity which cuts through the religious fog so prevalent today. It strips away the glamour of sin, fortifying the soul for the resolute practice of the Christian virtues-those true riches which alone will accompany him beyond the grave.

    And many, as Saints Behaving Badly reveals, were made of very rough materials indeed. The first book to lay bare the less than saintly behavior of thirty-two venerated holy men and women, it presents the scandalous, spicy, and sleazy detours they took on the road to sainthood.In nineteenth- and twentieth-century writings about the lives of the saints, authors tended to go out of their way to sanitize their stories, often glossing over the more embarrassing cases with phrases such as, "he/she was once a great sinner." In the early centuries of the Church and throughout the Middle Ages, however, writers took a more candid and spirited approach to portraying the saints. Exploring sources from a wide range of periods and places, Thomas Craughwell discovered a veritable rogues gallery of sinners-turned-saint. There's St. Olga, who unleashed a bloodbath on her husband's assassins; St. Mary of Egypt, who trolled the streets looking for new sexual conquests; and Thomas Becket, who despite his vast riches refused to give his cloak to a man freezing to death in the street.Written with wit and respect (each profile ends with what inspired the saint to give up his or her wicked ways) and illustrated with amusing caricatures, Saints Behaving Badly will entertain, inform, and even inspire Catholic readers across America.

    The path toward the liberated existence we all long for is found in a truth as simple to say as it is hard to do: love people, even the difficult ones, without distinction and without limits.Driven by Bob’s trademark storytelling, Everybody, Always reveals the lessons Bob learned--often the hard way--about what it means to love without inhibition, insecurity, or restriction. From finding the right friends to discovering the upside of failure, Everybody, Always points the way to embodying love by doing the unexpected, the intimidating, the seemingly impossible. Whether losing his shoes while skydiving solo or befriending a Ugandan witch doctor, Bob steps into life with a no-limits embrace of others that is as infectious as it is extraordinarily ordinary. Everybody, Always reveals how we can do the same.

    The word "sloth," however, can be misleading, for acedia is not laziness; in fact it can manifest as busyness or activism. Rather, acedia is a gloomy combination of weariness, sadness, and a lack of purposefulness. It robs a person of his capacity for joy and leaves him feeling empty, or void of meaningAbbot Nault says that acedia is the most oppressive of demons. Although its name harkens back to antiquity and the Middle Ages, and seems to have been largely forgotten, acedia is experienced by countless modern people who describe their condition as depression, melancholy, burn-out, or even mid-life crisis.He begins his study of acedia by tracing the wisdom of the Church on the subject from the Desert Fathers to Saint Thomas Aquinas. He shows how acedia afflicts persons in all states of life-- priests, religious, and married or single laymen. He details not only the symptoms and effects of acedia, but also remedies for it.

    I could never myself believe in God, if it were not for the cross. . . . In the real world of pain, how could one worship a God who was immune to it? With compelling honesty John Stott confronts this generation with the centrality of the cross in God's redemption of the world -- a world now haunted by the memories of Auschwitz, the pain of oppression and the specter of nuclear war. Can we see triumph in tragedy, victory in shame? Why should an object of Roman distaste and Jewish disgust be the emblem of our worship and the axiom of our faith? And what does it mean for us today? Now from one of the foremost preachers and Christian leaders of our day comes theology at its readable best, a contemporary restatement of the meaning of the cross. At the cross Stott finds the majesty and love of God disclosed, the sin and bondage of the world exposed. More than a study of the atonement, this book brings Scripture into living dialogue with Christian theology and the twentieth century. What emerges is a pattern for Christian life and worship, hope and mission. Destined to be a classic study of the center of our faith, Stott's work is the product of a uniquely gifted pastor, scholar and Christian statesman. His penetrating insight, charitable scholarship and pastoral warmth are guaranteed to feed both heart and mind.

    In the Gospels there are few people who understand love for Jesus as well as Mary Magdalene, which is the reason she is a prophetess of eucharistic love.This work is an extended meditation on the life of Saint Mary Magdalene, known as the "Apostle to the Apostles" because the Risen Christ appeared to her first and then sent her to announce the Resurrection to the apostles. Based on the biblical texts traditionally associated with Mary Magdalene, this book helps readers to learn from her inspiring example and to enter more deeply into adoration of Jesus Christ truly present in the Blessed Sacrament.In telling the story of Mary Magdalene's profound conversion after the Lord had to expel seven demons from her soul, this book shows how she is a shining witness to the transforming power of an encounter with Jesus Christ. Mary Magdalene is the perfect model for those who have experienced the redeeming love of Christ and who seek to deepen their devotion to him and to the Eucharist.

    But could the Mother of Jesus also be your mother?That's the question explored in the exciting new book, Meet Your Mother. This easy-read pocket book on Mary covers all the major teachings about the Mother of Jesus, but is particularly written for the person who has little or no background knowledge about her. Authored by Dr. Mark Miravalle, renowned Marian expert and professor who has taught and written about Mary for over 25 years, this is perfect to introduce someone to the life and truth about Jesus' Mother, but also to renew a person's existing knowledge and love for the woman who Jesus gave personally to every human being with his dying words, "This is your mother."

    Ought we to do so? What do we mean by prayer? What does the word mean in the Christian context? Almost always when we talk about prayer we refer to something we do. From that standpoint, questions problems, confusion, discouragement and illusions multiply. For Ruth Burrows it is essential to correct this view. Our Christian knowledge assures us that prayer is essentially what God does, how God addresses us, looks at us. And what God is doing for us is giving us the Divine Self in love. What then is the core of the central message of the revelation of Jesus? It is the unconditional love of God for us, for each one of us. God the unutterable, incomprehensible Mystery, the Reality of all reality, the Life of all Life. And this means that divine Love desires to communicate its Holy Self to us. This is the richness of the vision of a contemplative nun who contradicts the heresy of so much modern writing about the spiritual life--namely that we reach God by running faster. The growing fascination for the public of the contemplative and monastic life is evidence of the profound appeal of this approach. For this there is a real hunger. At its simplest we do no look for success so as to be assured that we do believe. We give ourselves over completely to divine love. Ultimately, we live for God and not for ourselves.