Drawn from a rich heritage, "Spiritual Disciplines for the Christian Life" will guide you through a carefully selected array of disciplines, including:Scripture readingPrayerWorshipScripture meditationEvangelismServingStewardship of time and moneyScripture applicationFastingSilence and solitudeJournalingLearningBy illustrating why the disciplines are important, showing how each one will help you grow in godliness, and offering practical suggestions for cultivating them, "Spiritual Disciplines for the Christian Life" will provide you with a refreshing opportunity to become more like Christ and grow in character and maturity.

    Full of reflection, faith, and dialogue, they reveal another side to this gifted author.

    For de Caussade, living in the moment meant having a complete trust and faith in God, for God's will defined and guided all things. The practical advice contained in his guidebook for the faithful was originally a series of letters written for the Nuns of the Visitation of Nancy, meant to help them navigate the confusing and difficult work of spiritual enlightenment, and comes together here in two distinct parts, one for the theoretical foundations of abandoning oneself to the present moment and one with practical advice on how to live such a life. Though a departure from the standard Christian perspective, Abandonment to Divine Providence remains a deeply spiritual work with a message that many Christians may find freeing and inspiring.

    Most books on prayer only inform the mind, but Chadwick both instructs the intellect and inspires the heart to meet God at the throne of grace.

    But between taking those first steps in pursuit of your dream and reaching your goal is a bumpy road of second-guessing, doubt, and fear. For the dreamer who wants a helping hand and a heartfelt friend along the way, Holley graciously offers this inspiring devotional journey to greater trust, joy, and confidence.Rather than the typical quiet devotional, this 40-day journey is an invitation and a challenge, a soul-soother and a game-changer. Through honest self-reflection and positive action, readers will not be the same on the last page as they were on the first--and neither will their view of God or the dreams he's placed within their hearts. Any woman who is ready to take that next step in making her God-sized dream a reality will cherish this confidence-building devotional.

    Using biblical passages, poetry, and excerpts from her journal, Wiederkehr provides meditative ideas and prayers as "postures" for realizing and approaching the holy in our daily lives.These reflections and prayers, then, have grown out of a daily listening to God in the changing seasons of my spiritual life, "writes the author. "These reflections have grown out of my conviction that our God is not some Almighty Being beyond us, but a Mystery within."

    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.

    Increasing numbers of us don't believe in God anymore. We don't expect miracles. We've grown up and left those fairytales behind, culturally and personally.Yet five hundred years ago the world was very much enchanted. It was a world where God existed and the devil was real. It was a world full of angels and demons. It was a world of holy wells and magical eels. But since the Protestant Reformation and the beginning of the Enlightenment, the world, in the West at least, has become increasingly disenchanted.While this might be taken as evidence of a crisis of belief, Richard Beck argues it's actually a crisis of attention. God hasn't gone anywhere, but we've lost our capacity to see God.The rising tide of disenchantment has profoundly changed our religious imaginations and led to a loss of the holy expectation that we can be interrupted by the sacred and divine. But it doesn't have to be this way. With attention and an intentional and cultivated capacity to experience God as a living, vital presence in our lives, Hunting Magic Eels, shows us, we can cultivate an enchanted faith in a skeptical age.

    But you might not love what you think.In this book, award-winning author James K. A. Smith shows that who and what we worship fundamentally shape our hearts. And while we desire to shape culture, we are not often aware of how culture shapes us. We might not realize the ways our hearts are being taught to love rival gods instead of the One for whom we were made. Smith helps readers recognize the formative power of culture and the transformative possibilities of Christian practices. He explains that worship is the "imagination station" that incubates our loves and longings so that our cultural endeavors are indexed toward God and his kingdom. This is why the church and worshiping in a local community of believers should be the hub and heart of Christian formation and discipleship.Following the publication of his influential work Desiring the Kingdom, Smith received numerous requests from pastors and leaders for a more accessible version of that book's content. No mere abridgment, this new book draws on years of Smith's popular presentations on the ideas presented in Desiring the Kingdom to offer a fresh, bottom-up rearticulation. The author creatively uses film, literature, and music illustrations to engage readers and includes material on marriage, family, youth ministry, and faith and work. He also suggests individual and communal practices for shaping the Christian life.

    A book that has and continues to move hearts.

    It will sometimes happen that where there is the most sorrow in the antecedents, there will be the most pleasure in the sequel. As the furious storm gives place to the clear sunshine, so the night of weeping precedes the morning of joy. Sorrow the harbinger; gladness the prince it ushers in. Cowper says:—"The path of sorrow, and that path alone, Leads to the place where sorrow is unknown."

    It is intended to instruct the faithful, and satisfy their pious desires. There might, perhaps, have been some reason to fear, at the very outset, that the mere title of Devotion to the Sacred Heart of Jesus Christ, however it might attract many persons to read this book, might also deter many others. Arrested by the first words, they might be led to form an inaccurate idea of the devotion. To remove this difficulty, it has been thought well to explain in the beginning, what is understood by devotion to the Sacred Heart of Jesus Christ. Experience has proved, that there is no one, who, after seeing in what it consists, does not agree, that it is reasonable, solid, and most useful, for our salvation, as well as for our perfection

    The new translation of Catholic text to be adopted by Catholic Mass to begin Advent 2011.

    While they had prepared to find a waterway to the Pacific Ocean, instead they found themselves in the Rocky Mountains. You too may feel that you are leading in a cultural context you were not expecting. You may even feel that your training holds you back more often than it carries you along. Drawing from his extensive experience as a pastor and consultant, Tod Bolsinger brings decades of expertise in guiding churches and organizations through uncharted territory. He offers a combination of illuminating insights and practical tools to help you reimagine what effective leadership looks like in our rapidly changing world. If you're going to scale the mountains of ministry, you need to leave behind canoes and find new navigational tools. Reading this book will set you on the right course to lead with confidence and courage.

    Ignatius of Loyola is the core work of religious formation for members of the Society of Jesus, the single largest religious order within the Roman Catholic Church. For four and a half centuries  in many thousands of editions in all languages, The Exercises have embodied fundamental spiritual principles essential to authentic Christian living. The mystical insight informing Ignatius's own relationship with God--which he distilled in The Exercises--is that the divine love of God is providentially present in all the details of our existence. Here Ignatius shows how the faithful can be joined to God in all things, according to the Jesuit motto, Ad majorem Dei gloriam, "For the greater glory of God."