For more than four-hundred years, Introduction to the Devout Life by Doctor of the Church St. Francis de Sales has been regarded as the essential guide to holiness and loving God. This spiritual classic takes on new life in Lift Up Your Heart, where Rev. John Burns has interpreted ten meditations for the modern reader and distilled them into a ten-day mini-retreat that can easily be completed in the midst of a busy life. This practical book goes right to the heart of helping you kick the habit of floating along on your spiritual journey to start actively pursuing holiness and devotion to God. During the course of the retreat, you'll learn the basics of forming a daily prayer routine, including how to offer yourself to God, meditate on his love, and maintain peace in the face of suffering and clarity in the midst of temptation. The meditations will help you:Adopt gratitude as a daily prayer practice.Examine and reorder your priorities and relationships to better reflect your love for God.Discern between good and evil in your life.Desire to love and serve as Jesus did.In a very real sense, Burns helps you take St. Francis de Sales as your spiritual director for ten days. As you do so, you’ll feel God’s fatherly love and restart your faith life, equipped with the tools to connect with God and live for heaven now.

    Garrigou-Lagrange; sets forth the classic Catholic traditions on the spiritual life as the full flowering of Sanctifying Grace in the soul. He explains the three stages of the spiritual life-the Purgative Way; the Illuminative Way; and the Unitive Way-showing the transitions or conversions from one period to another. How can one become a saint without knowing the way -- the pitfalls; common mistakes; and experience of Saints who have gone before. Impr. 112 pgs; PB

    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.

    Based in Milan, Italy, Giussani heads the Communion and Liberation movement and is a council for the Congregation for the Clergy and the Pontifical Council for the Laity. He discusses education in terms of fundamental truths, in particular, the element of faith. It presents the argument that without the fundamental factors of tradition, the young person is merely a fragile leaf separated from its branch.

    A. Pierce, author of Spirituality at Work The concluding prayer of the Mass is a command: Go in peace to love and serve the Lord. We are charged to go forth and quite literally transform our families, our communities, and our world through the redeeming sacrifice of Christ as celebrated in the Mass. Fr. Dominic Grassi and Joe Paprocki use this challenge as the starting point for their inspiring and illuminating look at the central act of Catholic worship. They ask, What would our faith look like if we truly understood the gift of the Eucharist?Living the Mass will stir a new passion for and a greater understanding of this sacred two-thousand-year-old celebration offered freely to all who come, to all who believe.  Also available in Spanish! Vivir la misa

    Pitre takes readers step-by-step from the Garden of Eden to the Book of Revelation to reveal how deeply biblical Catholic beliefs about Mary really are. Dr. Pitre uses the Old Testament and Ancient Judaism to unlock how the Bible itself teaches that Mary is in fact the new Eve, the Mother of God, the Queen of Heaven and Earth, and the new Ark of the Covenant.

    I n this new book, philosopher Jacob Needleman? whose voice and ideas have done so much to open the West to esoteric and Eastern religious ideas in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries?intimately considers humanity?s most vital question: What is God? Needleman begins by taking us more than a half century into the past, to his own experience as a brilliant, promising, Ivyeducated student of philosophy?atheistic, existential, and unwilling to blindly accept childish religiosity. But an unsettling meeting with the venerated Zen teacher D. T. Suzuki, combined with the sudden need to accept a dreary position teaching the philosophy of religion, forced the young academician to look more closely at the religious ideas he had once thought dead. Within traditional religious texts the scholar discovered a core of esoteric and philosophical ideas, more mature and challenging than anything he had ever associated with Judaism, Christianity, and the religions of the East. At the same time, Needleman came to realize?as he shares with the reader?that ideas and words are not enough. Ideas and words, no matter how profound, cannot prevent hatred, arrogance, and ultimate despair, and cannot prevent our individual lives from descending into violence and illusion. And with this insight, Needleman begins to open the reader to a new kind of understanding: The inner realization that in order to lead the lives we were intended for, the very nature of human experience must change, including the very structure of our perception and indeed the very structure of our minds. In What Is God?, Needleman draws us closer to the meaning and nature of this needed change?and shows how our present confusion about the purpose of religion and the concept of God reflects a widespread psychological starvation for this specific quality of thought and experience. In rich and varied detail, the book describes this inner experience?and how almost all of us, atheists and ?believers? alike, actually have been visited by it, but without understanding what it means and why the intentional cultivation of this quality of experience is necessary for the fullness of our existence.

    This book offers a Catholic understanding of the four ancient temperaments that will bring you closer to God and help you discover the path to holiness that's right for you. Learn how to identify and understand the four temperaments that determine our reactions, guide our choices, color our understanding, and serve as the foundation of our moral and spiritual life.

    Dubay explores the reasons why all of the most eminent physicists of the twentieth century agree that beauty is the primary standard for scientific truth. Likewise, the best of contemporary theologians are also exploring with renewed vigor the aesthetic dimensions of divine revelation. Honest searchers after truth can hardly fail to be impressed that these two disciplines, science and theology, so different in methods, approaches and aims, are yet meeting in this and other surprising and gratifying ways.This book relates these developments to nature, music, academe and our unquenchable human thirst for unending beauty, truth and ecstasy, a thirst quenched only at the summit of contemplative prayer here below, and in the consummation of the beatific vision hereafter.

    Learn to avoid the distractions that trouble and weary your soul, and you'll soon be able to focus your energy simply on loving God!

    Pieper's attention is ever to the particular virtue, its precise meaning, and to its contribution to the wholeness that constituted an ordered, active, and truthful human life. No better brief account of the virtues can be found. Pieper has long instructed us in these realities that need to be made operative in each life as it touches all else `that is', as Pieper himself often puts it." - James V. Schall, S.J., Georgetown University "A fine and thought provoking examination of the relationship between the mind, heart, and moral life of the human person." - John Cardinal O'Connor, Archbishop of New York "Pieper's sentences are admirably constructed and his ideas are expressed with maximum clarity. He restores to philosophy what common sense obstinately tells us ought to be found there: wisdom and insight." - T. S. Eliot

    It is about shedding light, not heat. It's about reframing the argument so hearts can be opened and minds can be inspired. How to Defend the Faith without Raising Your Voice is a new sort of apologetics. It is for those moments when you are thrust into the spotlight as the token Catholic whether the spotlight is simply at the office water cooler or whether it is front and center at the in-laws Thanksgiving celebration. How to Defend the Faith without Raising Your Voice gives Catholics a fresh way of explaining the Church's teaching on contentious issues humanly, compellingly, and succinctly.But this book does not pretend to suggest it is as simple as memorizing a speech. Every conversation is different. Every day's news cycle will bring new arguments and new challenges. Instead, it is a book about what the issues really are and where the criticisms are coming from so you can understand and communicate effectively.

    With a mastery of Scripture equal to that of the most committed Protestants, author David Armstrong shows that the Catholic Church is the "Bible Church par excellence," and that many common Protestant doctrines are in fact not biblical.

    Ignatius of Loyola, the founder of the Society of Jesus, this book will help you realize the Ignatian goal of “finding God in all things.” Filled with relatable  examples, humorous stories, and anecdotes from the heroic and inspiring lives of Jesuit saints and average priests and brothers, The Jesuit Guide to Almost Everything will enrich your everyday life with spiritual guidance and history.

    —from Chapter Eight What happens when women give their lives over to God? They become vessels of grace, bearers of healing, consolation, encouragement and strength to a troubled world. Far from being passive, the woman of grace will actively embrace God's will, actively seek out the suffering and lost, and actively bring God's healing love to others. If she accepts God's call to authentic womanhood, her role, in the words of a closing speech at Vatican Council II, becomes nothing less than to "aid humanity in not falling." Full of Grace will empower all women to fully embrace their God-given identity. This edition of Full of Grace is now correlated to The Women of Grace® Foundational Study Series. A Servant Book. "A beautiful woman-to-woman book on the way to holiness for Catholic women. A book for all ages."—Ronda De Sola Chervin, Ph.D., author and speaker "Johnnette Benkovic masterfully combines the teachings of Scripture and the Church with a down-to-earth program for the way to holiness, upholding the mission of Christian women in the world today."—Father George T. Montague, S.M., author of The Woman and the Way "Well-written, well-researched and filled with spiritual insight, this spiritual manual is a true aid to those who seek holiness."—Monica Migliorino Miller, Ph.D., author, The Authority of Women in the Catholic Church "A glowing account flowing out of a maternal heart that illuminates the glorious mission God has confided to women in the world and in the Church."—Alice von Hildebrand, Ph.D., author and speaker