Walking from East to West: God in the Shadows


Ravi Zacharias - 2006
    Ravi has spoken of his own journey only in bits and pieces in his other books and talks. It is a journey that has led him beyond his family and culture into a revelation that replaced pantheism with monotheism, and into a relationship with a God the vast majority of his people do not worship. From this new understanding birthed in him by the founder of Christianity, Ravi has gone forward to teach as one of our generation’s great apologists.A life lived in Christ is the greatest argument of all for the living God. Ravi urges the reader to look at the lives that have turned the hearts of people into movements for Christ. In the first three centuries of the church, the Apostles and followers like Polycarp and Tertullian and Origen demonstrated with their lives the truth of the resurrected Christ. A whole line of witnesses from every generation succeeded these who walked in the footsteps of Jesus, with names like Augustine, Catherine of Sienna, Bernard of Clairvaux, Luther, and Wesley leading the procession.But history begins on an individual level.Ravi shows readers his life, in its successes and failures, in its existence in the East and in the West, and in his attempts to bring the truth of Christ to those in any culture who don’t know him. The Hebrew poet has said that a life rich in experiences is a life from which others can learn.This book is about Ravi’s journey, from meaninglessness to the abundant joy of Christ, from East to West and back again, in the all-consuming passion of letting the world know about true freedom, and in whom that freedom is found.

Meditations for Lent


Jacques-Bénigne Bossuet - 2014
    . . which is precisely what we are called to do in Lent!

The Doctrine of Repentance


Thomas Watson - 1688
    Few better guides have existed in any area of spiritual experience than Thomas Watson.

For the Life of the World: Sacraments and Orthodoxy


Alexander Schmemann - 1973
    He understands issues such as secularism and Christian culture from the perspective of the unbroken experience of the Church, as revealed and communicated in her worship, in her liturgy-the sacrament of the world, the sacrament of the Kingdom.For over half a century For the Life of the World has challenged, illumined, and inspired readers from many backgrounds. For some it is an introduction to the Orthodox Church, while for others it is a call to plunge more deeply into the life of the Kingdom, both manifested and anticipated here and now in the liturgy of the Church. This updated edition of Schmemann's classic text includes a new foreword by Dr Edith M. Humphrey, along with new explanatory notes and an index.

Live No Lies: Recognize and Resist the Three Enemies That Sabotage Your Peace


John Mark Comer - 2021
    Not with a foreign government or domestic terrorists or a creepy new artificial intelligence hell-bent on taking over the world. No, it's a war we feel deep inside our own chests: we are at war with lies.The problem isn't so much that we tell lies but that we live them. We let them into our bodies, and they sabotage our peace. All around us in the culture and deep within our own body memories are lies: deceptive ideas that wreak havoc on our emotional health and spiritual well-being, and deceptive ideas about who God is, who we are, and what the good life truly is.The choice is not whether to fight or not fight, but whether we win or surrender.Ancient apprentices of Jesus developed a paradigm for this war; they spoke of the three enemies of the soul: the devil, the flesh, and the world. Live No Lies taps into this ancient wisdom from saints of the Way and translates the three enemies for the modern era, with all its secularism and sophistication. As a generation, we chuckle at the devil as a premodern myth, we are confused by Scripture's teaching on the flesh in an age where sensual indulgence is a virtue not a vice, and we have little to no category for the New Testament concept of the world.In this provocative and practical book, bestselling author John Mark Comer combines cultural analysis with spiritual formation. He identifies the role lies play in our spiritual deformation and lays out a strategic plan to overcome them.Do you feel the tug-of-war in your own heart, the inner conflict between truth and lies? The spirit and the flesh? The Way of Jesus and the world? It's time to start winning. It's time to live no lies...

Disciplines of a Godly Man


R. Kent Hughes - 1991
    This inspiring, popular book has been speaking to the hearts of men for the past 10 years, and its words are still relevant. Using engaging illustrations, scriptural wisdom, practical suggestions and study questions, Kent Hughes offers a frank biblical discussion on major areas of Christian manhood: family, godliness, leadership, ministry and more. This newly revised edition is for every man who wants to know what it means to be a Christian in today's world.

The Cry of the Soul: How Our Emotions Reveal Our Deepset Questions about God


Dan B. Allender - 1994
    I should know. I first read The Cry of the Soul decades ago when I was still sorting through a lot of hurt and frustration connected with my quadriplegia (yes, I read it on that music stand holding a mouth stick). The Cry of the Soul showed me what to do with my anger and hurt--not stuff it under the carpet of my conscience, or minimize it, but actually do something good with it."All emotion--whether positive or negative--can give us a glimpse of the true nature of God. We want to control our negative emotions and dark desires. God wants us to recognize them as the cry of our soul to be made right with Him. Beginning with the Psalms, Cry of the Soul explores what Scripture says about our darker emotions and points us to ways of honoring God as we faithfully embrace the full range of our emotional life.

The Four Last Things: A Catechetical Guide to Death, Judgment, Heaven, and Hell


Fr Wade Menezes - 2017
    Every person, even the atheist, will admit that death is certain. Death, however, is not the last event in this life of ours. Immediately after death, we shall be judged and then again on the Day of Judgment when all humanity will know us for what we are. Too often the reality of Heaven and salvation are highlighted at the expense of the Church's teachings on Death, Judgment, Purgatory, and Hell. Yet, these important doctrines of the Church hold the truths of salvation truths that can lead us to Heaven or can pull us away from it. In these pages, Fr. Wade Menezes, EWTN television host and Assistant General of the Fathers of Mercy, shows us that God has not called us to His wrath, but to salvation. He shows us that Heaven and Hell, salvation and damnation, eternal life and eternal punishment are all complementary doctrines. They need each other to be complete and we must understand the Church's teachings on all of these doctrines in order to have a balanced view of the world. Death, Judgment, Heaven and Hell these are the Four Last Things toward which we are moving each hour of the day and night. Read this book, and you'll have a firm grasp of one of the most important doctrines of Holy Mother Church that holds the truths of Heaven and our own salvation.

A Mind at Peace


Christopher O. Blum - 2017
    We’re experiencing a worldwide crisis of attention in which information overwhelms us, corrodes true communion with others, and leaves us anxious, unsettled, bored, isolated, and lonely. These pages provide the time-tested antidote that enables you to regain an ordered and peaceful mind in a technologically advanced world. Drawing on the wisdom of the world’s greatest thinkers, including Plato, Aristotle, St. Augustine, and St. Thomas Aquinas, these pages help you identify – and show you how to cultivate – the qualities of character you need to survive in our media-saturated environment. This book offers a calm, measured, yet forthright and effective approach to regaining interior peace. Here you’ll find no argument for retreat from the modern world; instead these pages provide you with a practical guide to recovering self-mastery and interior peace through wise choices and ordered activity in the midst of the world’s communication chaos. Are you increasingly frustrated and perplexed in this digital age? Do you yearn for a mind that is more focused and a soul able to put down that IPhone and simply rejoice in the good and the true? It’s not hard to do. The saints and the wise can show you how; this book makes their counsel available to you.

An Essay On the Development of Christian Doctrine


John Henry Newman - 1845
    He then goes on to sweeping consideration of the growth and development of doctrine in the Catholic Church, from the time of the Apostles to Newman's own era. He demonstrates that the basic "rule" under which Christianity proceeded through the centuries that throughout the entire life of the Church this law of development has been in effect and safeguards the faith from any real corruption.

Friends Of God: Homilies


Josemaría Escrivá - 1982
    Josemaria Escriva helps you develop a strong, lasting friendship with the God who is close to us. St. Josemaria gives you a broad picture of the basic human and Christian virtues, so that you can not only follow closely in our Lord's footsteps, but establish and maintain a filial dialogue with God. Each of his homilies here are not only heartfelt conversations with the Christian who is immersed in ordinary life, but also a prayerful colloquy with God. With a masterful pastor's hand St. Josemaria combines theological depth with evangelical clarity. He gives you here not only a lesson in doctrine, but an introduction to essential aspects of the Christian life. Simple, compassionate, and profound, these homilies are a full expression of St. Josemaria's passionate, expansive love for God.

Something Other than God: How I Passionately Sought Happiness and Accidentally Found It


Jennifer Fulwiler - 2014
    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.

What Jesus Saw from the Cross (Revised)


Antonin Sertillanges - 1930
    Never has there been spiritual reading as powerful as What Jesus Saw from the Cross, the book that will intensify your love of Jesus by burning the events of His Passion into your memory and imagination. Written by Rev. A. G. Sertillanges, this acclaimed devotional classic gives you vivid and dramatic details not included in the Gospel.

The Long Loneliness: The Autobiography of the Legendary Catholic Social Activist


Dorothy Day - 1952
    This inspiring and fascinating memoir, subtitled, “The Autobiography of the Legendary Catholic Social Activist,” The Long Loneliness is the late Dorothy Day’s compelling autobiographical testament to her life of social activism and her spiritual pilgrimage.A founder of the Catholic Worker Movement and longtime associate of Peter Maurin, Dorothy Day was eulogized in the New York Times as, “a nonviolent social radical of luminous personality.” The Long Loneliness recounts her remarkable journey from the Greenwich Village political and literary scene of the 1920s through her conversion to Catholicism and her lifelong struggle to help bring about “the kind of society where it is easier to be good.” (Description from Amazon.)

The Attributes of God


Arthur W. Pink - 1988
    Without understanding God's attributes, we have a skewed perception of him--often one cast in our own image. We need more than just a theoretical knowledge of God in order to worship him as he desires. This classic work of Arthur W. Pink invites readers to discover the truth about seventeen attributes of God, including his sovereignty, immutability, patience, love, faithfulness, and much more. Pink shows readers a God who is alive, all-powerful, and active in his creation. The perfect introductory text, The Attributes of God also has enough depth and meat to satisfy the more experienced reader.