The Amazing Secret of the Souls in Purgatory is such a book. Maria Simma, lived humbly in the mountains of Austria. When shew as twenty-five, Maria was graced with a very special charism - the charism of being visited by the many souls in Purgatory - and being able to communicate with them! In her words, Maria shares with us some amazing secrets about the souls in Purgatory. She answers questions such as:What is Purgatory?How do souls get there?Who decides if a soul goes to Purgatory?What are the sins that most lead to Purgatory?How can we help get a soul released from Purgatory?Are there religions which are bad for the soul?Are there children in Purgatory?How can I avoid Purgatory?This is a remarkable interview on after-death realities, a true revelation for those who have lost a dear one!

    Fr. George Moorman. Extremely informative, yet very easy to read! Explains, prayer by prayer, what happens at the Latin Mass and why. Answers all your questions about the Mass: why Latin is used, silence, bells, specific colors, etc., and how we participate. Ties in beautifully with Pope Benedict XVI's motu proprio opening the door to the universal celebration of the Latin Mass.

    Sheila Miyoshi Jager presents the first comprehensive history of this misunderstood war, one that risks involving the world’s superpowers—again. Her sweeping narrative ranges from the middle of the Second World War—when Korean independence was fiercely debated between Roosevelt, Stalin, and Churchill—to the present day, as North Korea, with China’s aid, stockpiles nuclear weapons while starving its people. At the center of this conflict is an ongoing struggle between North and South Korea for the mantle of Korean legitimacy, a "brother’s war," which continues to fuel tensions on the Korean peninsula and the region.Drawing from newly available diplomatic archives in China, South Korea, and the former Soviet Union, Jager analyzes top-level military strategy. She brings to life the bitter struggles of the postwar period and shows how the conflict between the two Koreas has continued to evolve to the present, with important and tragic consequences for the region and the world. Her portraits of the many fascinating characters that populate this history—Truman, MacArthur, Kim Il Sung, Mao, Stalin, and Park Chung Hee—reveal the complexities of the Korean War and the repercussions this conflict has had on lives of many individuals, statesmen, soldiers, and ordinary people, including the millions of hungry North Koreans for whom daily existence continues to be a nightmarish struggle.The most accessible, up-to date, and balanced account yet written, illustrated with dozens of astonishing photographs and maps, Brothers at War will become the definitive chronicle of the struggle’s origins and aftermath and its global impact for years to come.

    Svensson himself is a renegade detective with a network of informants second to none - mainly the girlfriends of gang members, who come to him for protection. Among the housing estates of Glasgow, the city with the highest murder rate in Europe, Karen McCluskey is on a one-woman mission to reform the force. And in Hackney, 19-year-old Pilgrim has made himself one of the most feared gang-members in East London, wanted for attempted murder and seemingly condemned to a life of crime. In 'Hood Rat' these narratives interlock in a shocking exposé of Britain's underworld that ranks with Roberto Saviano's bestselling 'Gomorrah'.

    One of his few writings, the booklet also includes many pictures of Blessed Padre Pio from throughout his ministry. Padre Pio's beautiful and descriptive manner of writing provide a wonderful spiritual insight into that last night of Jesus' human life.

    Bush campaigned for the White House, he was such a novice in foreign policy that he couldn't name the president of Pakistan and momentarily suggested he thought the Taliban was a rock-and-roll band. But he relied upon a group called the Vulcans--an inner circle of advisers with a long, shared experience in government, dating back to the Nixon, Ford, Reagan and first Bush administrations. After returning to power in 2001, the Vulcans were widely expected to restore U.S. foreign policy to what it had been under George H. W. Bush and previous Republican administrations. Instead, the Vulcans put America on an entirely new and different course, adopting a far-reaching set of ideas that changed the world and America's role in it. Rise of the Vulcans is nothing less than a detailed, incisive thirty-five-year history of the top six members of the Vulcans--Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, Colin Powell, Paul Wolfowitz, Richard Armitage, and Condoleezza Rice--and the era of American dominance they represent. It is the story of the lives, ideas and careers of Bush's war cabinet--the group of Washington insiders who took charge of America's response to September 11 and led the nation into its wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.Separately, each of these stories sheds astonishing light not only on the formative influences that brought these nascent leaders from obscurity to the pinnacle of power, but also on the experiences, conflicts and competitions that prefigured their actions on the present world stage. Taken together, the individuals in this book represent a unique generation in American history--a generation that might be compared to the wise men who shaped American policy after World War II or the best and brightest who prosecuted the war in Vietnam. Over the past three decades, since the time of Vietnam, these individuals have gradually led the way in shaping a new vision of an unchallengeable America seeking to dominate the globe through its military power.

    A steadfast champion of the working man, family, and faith, Chesterton eloquently opposed materialism, snobbery, hypocrisy, and any adversary of freedom and simplicity in modern society.Culled from the thousands of essays he contributed to newspapers and periodicals over his lifetime, the critical works collected for this edition pulse with the author's unique brand of clever commentary. As readable and rewarding today as when they were written over a century ago, these pieces offer Chesterton's unparalleled analysis of contemporary ideals, his incisive critique of modern efficiency, and his humorous but heartfelt defense of the common man against trendsetting social assaults.

    In its scope and itnerest it can be compared with Freud's Totem and Taboo, the subtext Girard refutes with polemic daring, vast erudition, and a persuasiveness that leaves the reader compelled to respond, one way or another.This is the single fullest summation of Girard's ideas to date, the book by which they will stand or fall. In a dialogue with two psychiatrists (Jean-Michel Oughourlian and Guy Lefort), Girard probes an encyclopedic array of topics, ranging across the entire spectrum of anthropology, psychoanalysis, and cultural production.Girard's point of departure is what he calles "mimesis," the conflict that arises when human rivals compete to differentiate themselves from each other, yet succeed only in becoming more and more alike. At certain points in the life of a society, according to Girard, this mimetic conflict erupts into a crisis in which all difference dissolves in indiscriminate violence. In primitive societies, such crises were resolved by the "scapegoating mechanism," in which the community, en masse, turned on an unpremeditated victim. The repression of this collective murder and its repetition in ritual sacrifice then formed the foundations of both religion and the restored social order.How does Christianity, at once the most "sacrificial" of religions and a faith with a non-violent ideology, fit into this scheme? Girard grants Freud's point, in Totem and Taboo, that Christianity is similar to primitive religion, but only to refute Freud—if Christ is sacrificed, Girard argues, it is not becuase God willed it, but because human beings wanted it.The book is not merely, or perhaps not mainly, biblical exegesis, for within its scope fall some of the most vexing problems of social history—the paradox that violence has social efficacy, the function of the scapegoat, the mechanism of anti-semitism.

    An excellent book for use with the Extraordinary Form of the Roman Rite.

    The authors in this series take a panoramic approach to the topic of each book aimed at a non-specialist but enthusiastic readership. Forthcoming titles planned for this series include: literature, salvation, mercy, history, art, music and philosophy.At every Sunday Mass, Catholics confess that Jesus came down from heaven "for us men and for our salvation." But what does "salvation" mean? In this robust and accessible book, Scripture scholar and theologian Michael Patrick Barber provides a thorough, deeply Catholic, and deeply biblical, answer. He deftly tackles this complex topic, unpacking what the New Testament teaches about salvation in Christ, detailing what exactly salvation is, and what it is not. In easy and readable prose, he explains what the Cross, the Church, and the Trinity have to do with salvation. While intellectually stimulating, Salvation: What Every Catholic Should Know is deeply spiritual, and at its core is the salvific message that God is love, and his love is one of transformation and redemption.

    He then describes the Church's developing self-awareness of its dual elements of the human and divine. Concerned with verifying the Church's claim to embody Christ, Giussani situates the locus of verification in human experience, arguing that a different type of life is born in those who try to live the life of the Church. Why the Church? is a seminal study that will engage both the scholar and the general reader.

    St. Thomas Aquinas has much to teach us--most especially how to confront the classic questions that are still with us after centuries of thought.

    Using visual documentation—portraits, architecture, allegorical engravings—as well as written sources, Bailyn, one of our most esteemed historians, paints a complex picture of that distant but still remarkably relevant world. He explores the powerfully creative effects of the Founders’ provincialism and lays out in fine detail the mingling of gleaming utopianism and tough political pragmatism in Thomas Jefferson’s public career, and the effect that ambiguity had on his politics, political thought, and present reputation. And Benjamin Franklin emerges as a figure as cunning in his management of foreign affairs and of his visual image as he was amiable, relaxed, and amusing in his social life. Bailyn shows, too, why it is that the Federalist papers—polemical documents thrown together frantically, helter-skelter, by Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, and John Jay in a fierce political battle two hundred years ago—have attained canonical status, not only as a penetrating analysis of the American Constitution but as a timeless commentary on the nature of politics and constitutionalism. Professor Bailyn concludes, in a wider perspective, with an effort to locate the effect of the Founders’ imaginative thought on political reformers throughout the Atlantic world. Precisely how their principles were received abroad, Bailyn writes, is as ambiguous as the personalities of the remarkably creative pro-vincials who founded the American nation.

    As he put the phone down and stared into the darkness of his hotel room, he feared he'd been handed a political death sentence. The year was 1993, and he would be responsible for an economy that had had seven different currencies in the previous eight years to cope with inflation that had run at 3000 percent a year. Brazil had a habit of chewing up finance ministers with the ferocity of an Amazon piranha. This was just one of the turns in a largely unscripted and sometimes unwanted political career. In exile during the harshest period of the junta that ruled Brazil for twenty years, Cardoso started his political life with a tentative run for the Federal Senate in 1978. Within fifteen years, and despite himself, this former sociologist was running the country.And what a country! Brazil, it is often said, is on the edge of modernity, striding with one foot in mid-air towards the future, the other still rooted deep in a traditional past. It is a land of sophisticated music and brutal gold-digging, of the next global superpower and the last old-time coffee plantations. It is gloriously ungovernable, irrepressibly attractive, and home to the family, friends and extraordinary life of Fernando Henrique Cardoso. This is his story and his love song to his country.

    Through the author's honest (and sometimes funny) examination of these sins in her own life, as well as Church teaching, she gives us the tools to kick these bad habits before they kick us.