When everything seems chaotic and we are faced with a multitude of negative realities, we might be tempted to say that nothing makes sense anymore. But we are not alone—God walks with us and his presence fills us with hope. Because of this we are able to smile in the midst of our di culties. Despair is defeated because God is with us. Hope does not disappoint!What gives you hope? What are your hopes and dreams—for yourself, your children, your church, your community, your nation? What sustains that hope and turns those dreams into reality? What are some of the unique ways you bring hope to people in your life? The contributors featured in Beautiful Hope offer intensely personal answers to these questions. Some of them are well-known authors and speakers, but many are ordinary Catholics dealing with everyday life with all its challenges and problems, just like you. Their stories are meant to spark your own exploration of hope and increase its abundance in your life.Today many are worried about the future and what it holds. Many are concerned about the future of our Church. If we are to become those who can shine the light of faith into the darkness of our world, things must change. We need an infusion of hope so we can see more clearly and live boldly as children of God.

    He decided to send an email to all of these Ambassadors, asking for their answers to three questions:Why do you love being Catholic?What is your favorite memory as a Catholic?As a Catholic, what are your hopes for the future?The response was overwhelming.Why I Love Being Catholic is the result of that rallying call. Compiled from thousands of answers, this collection of insights, stories, hopes, and dreams is both inspirational and motivational.The authors are people just like you they've laughed, cried, suffered, and celebrated their way through all the ups and downs of life. Some have been Catholic all their lives; others have taken a longer route home. All, however, can speak to the amazing gift that the Catholic faith has been in their lives.These days, it's challenging to be a Catholic. The collection of entries in Why I Love Being Catholic celebrates the best of the Catholic faith, highlights the everyday miracles taking place all around us, and reminds us that there are thousands of everyday heroes out there who dare to have big dreams for the Church. Even amidst the challenges of our times, holiness is possible, grace abounds, and there is every reason to live our lives with hope!

    Yet many of our youth never get beyond the material distractions of the world. In fact, in a recent survey, teenagers were eight times more desirous of being rich and five times more desirous of being famous than pursuing a life of faith. To be young and Catholic in the modern world is no easy task. Entertained and enticed beyond their ability to cope, millions of Catholic teens and college students are drifting through life living without purpose or meaning. They are searching for their own path, but they are ill-equipped at such an impressionable age to discern the direction that leads to everlasting happiness. In this book, renowned Catholic leader Curtis Martin presents the evidence that we have been made for more than just the intoxications of this world sex, partying, and money. We have been made for greatness and we will only reach such heights when we first come into a personal relationship with Jesus Christ. Made for More makes a compelling case that: We have been made for eternal happiness with God in heaven. The secret of happiness lies in following God's plan for our life. Jesus is the Son of God who preached the good news of salvation. Jesus founded a community of believers, the Church, and that being part of this family of God is how we find our direction and purpose and the surest path to eternal life.

    

    With fresh biblical insight tracing all the way back to Eve and a treasury of practical application, Jess and Hayley reveal how women today can walk in the true liberty we already have in Jesus.Because you don’t have to be everything to everyone. You don’t have to try so hard to button it up and hold it together. And you certainly don’t have to quiet the voice that God gave you when he created you to sing. Wild and Free will help you shake off the lies of insecurity in your life, and step forward to maximize your God-given influence for his glory and the world’s good.

    Captured by the Russian army during World War II and convicted of being a Vatican spy, American Jesuit Father Walter J. Ciszek spent some 23 agonizing years in Soviet prisons and the labor camps of Siberia. He here recalls how it was only through an utter reliance on God's will that he managed to endure. He tells of the courage he found in prayer-a courage that eased the loneliness, the pain, the frustrations, the anguish, the fears, the despair. For, as Ciszek relates, the solace of spiritual contemplation gave him an inner serenity upon which he was able to draw amidst the arrogance of evil that surrounded him. Learning to accept even the inhuman work of toiling in the infamous Siberian salt mines as a labor pleasing to God, he was able to turn adverse forces into a source of positive value and a means of drawing closer to the compassionate and never-forsaking Divine Spirit. He Leadeth Me is a book to inspire all Christians to greater faith and trust in God-even in their darkest hour.

    There is only one solution to the problems we face saints! Becoming a saint is a choice, and we must begin choosing the saint within each of us. The biggest crisis of our time is not economic, health care, or vocations, but is an identity crisis. We have forgotten our mission to become saints and forgotten our story as Catholics. We must rediscover that mission and hold each other accountable to accepting responsibility for that mission. We need heroic Catholicism. Everything we need to accomplish our mission is in the Church but the Catholic Church is a sleeping giant. It is time we wake the sleeping giant! This book is a five step guide to choosing the saint within you. The world doesn't need another John Paul II or Mother Teresa. The world needs you. Your ordinary life has an extraordinary purpose.

    Michael E. Gaitley, MIC, author of the popular book "Consoling the Heart of Jesus," comes an extraordinary 33-day journey to Marian consecration with four giants of Marian spirituality: St. Louis de Montfort, St. Maximilian Kolbe, Blessed Mother Teresa of Calcutta, and Blessed Pope John Paul II. Father Michael masterfully summarizes their teaching, making it easy to grasp, and simple enough to put into practice. More specifically, he weaves their thought into a user-friendly, do-it-yourself retreat that will bless even the busiest of people. So, if you've been thinking about entrusting yourself to Mary for the first time or if you're simply looking to deepen and renew your devotion to her, "33 Days to Morning Glory" is the right book to read and the perfect retreat to make.

    . . and life-changing. Discover why growing in prayer, which sometimes can be compared to a battle, is worth every ounce of effort you give it. Even if you've never prayed, or if you've never developed the habit of daily prayer, God is waiting to meet you where you are and encourage you every step of the way. Using a simple approach to prayer, you'll learn how even ten minutes a day can change your life. Author Dan Burke explains how to set up your own sacred prayer space, discusses the common obstacles to prayer, and provides practical ways to overcome them. You'll also read stories of others who are seeking to orient themselves to God through prayer. If you re ready for God to transform your heart and mind, you will know the life that Jesus has promised; a life of peace and joy that cannot be taken away by the trials of this world.

    Edward Sri provides an approachable but in-depth exploration of what it means to be a disciple of Christ. At the outset, he emphasizes the importance of every Christian’s developing the desire to be a true disciple of Christ and gives the reader a first glimpse of what the life of a disciple looks like. As the book progresses, he unfolds what a true encounter of love with Christ entails and explores the transforming power of God’s grace. He also offers for consideration “the four habits of a disciple”: prayer, the breaking of bread (the Sacraments), fellowship, and the teaching of the Apostles. The book concludes with a powerful call to fulfill every Christian’s mission of evangelization. Into His Likeness is a down-to-earth and tremendously valuable handbook for anyone wishing to pursue Christ wholeheartedly.

    Designed for individual or group settings, How to Read Your Way to Heaven will guide your quest to delve deeper into a relationship with Christ by meditating on the written word while organizing your reading around the four pillars of the Catholic Faith the Creed, the sacraments, morality, and prayer. How to Read Your Way to Heaven is not merely another book to read. It is designed to be an invaluable tool for guiding and organizing your reading to help you on your journey to become a saint. And best of all, this fully integrated do-it-yourself spiritual reading program that can be easily followed by the busiest of Catholics with the tightest of schedules.

    Father Joe is Tony Hendra’s inspiring true story of finding faith, friendship, and family through the decades-long influence of a surpassingly wise Benedictine monk named Father Joseph Warrillow.Like everything human, it started with sex. In 1955, fourteen-year-old Tony found himself entangled with a married Catholic woman. In Cold War England, where Catholicism was the subject of news stories and Graham Greene bestsellers, Tony was whisked off by the woman’s husband to see a priest and be saved.Yet what he found was a far cry from the priests he’d known at Catholic school, where boys were beaten with belts or set upon by dogs. Instead, he met Father Joe, a gentle, stammering, ungainly Benedictine who never used the words “wrong” or “guilt,” who believed that God was in everyone and that “the only sin was selfishness.” During the next forty years, as his life and career drastically ebbed and flowed, Tony discovered that his visits to Father Joe remained the one constant in his life—the relationship that, in the most serious sense, saved it.From the fifties and his adolescent desire to join an abbey himself; to the sixties, when attending Cambridge and seeing the satire of Beyond the Fringe convinced him to change the world with laughter, not prayer; to the seventies and successful stints as an original editor of National Lampoon and a writer of Lemmings, the off-Broadway smash that introduced John Belushi and Chevy Chase; to professional disaster after co-creating the legendary English series Spitting Image; from drinking to drugs, from a failed first marriage to a successful second and the miracle of parenthood—the years only deepened Tony’s need for the wisdom of his other and more real father, creating a bond that could not be broken, even by death.A startling departure for this acclaimed satirist, Father Joe is a sincere account of how Tony Hendra learned to love. It’s the story of a whole generation looking for a way back from mockery and irony, looking for its own Father Joe, and a testament to one of the most charismatic mentors in modern literature.From the Hardcover edition.

    As a mother of seven, she knows we don t just need to be told what kind of women we should be. We need some help getting there.Drawing from her own experience of balancing marriage, motherhood, and work inside and outside the home, Lisa helps you uncover the key to living a busy life with inner calm. What's the secret? Identifying key priorities, and doing first what matters most. With humor and wisdom, Lisa will help you: Stop striving and rest in God's unconditional love. Experience new hope in your marriage. Reach your child's heart. Create clarity in a cluttered home. Find friendships that go below the surface and satisfy. Discover your passion and purpose. Once in awhile, things may seem as if they re under control, but we want to walk with purpose regardless of our circumstances. God wants us to daily experience the joy and contentment that comes from knowing we have given our all to what he considers most important. The abundant and purposeful life we were created to live is just around the corner.

    This classic work is a short treatise on peace of heart in a world where restlessness and anxiety too often take the place of the confidence and peace which ought to be ours.

    (First Place). With atheism on the rise and millions tossing off religion, why would anyone consider the Catholic Church? Brandon Vogt, a bestselling author and the content director for Bishop Robert Barron’s Word on Fire Catholic Ministries, shares his passionate search for truth, a journey that culminated in the realization that Catholicism was right about a lot of things, maybe even everything. His persuasive case for the faith reveals a vision of Catholicism that has answers our world desperately needs and reminds those already in the Church what they love about it. A 2016 study by the Public Religion Research Institute found that 25 percent of adults (39 percent of young adults) describe themselves as unaffiliated with any religion. Millions of these so-called “nones” have fled organized religion and many more have rejected God altogether. Brandon Vogt was one of those nones. When he converted to Catholicism in college, he knew how confusing that decision was to many of his friends and family. But he also knew that the evidence he discovered pointed to one conclusion: Catholicism is true. To his delight, he discovered it was also exceedingly good and beautiful.Why I Am Catholic traces Vogt’s spiritual journey, making a refreshing, twenty-first century case for the faith and answering questions being asked by agnostics, nones, and atheists, the audience for his popular website, StrangeNotions.com, where Catholics and atheists dialogue. With references to Catholic thinkers such as G. K. Chesterton, Ven. Fulton Sheen, St. Teresa of Calcutta, and Bishop Robert Barron, Vogt draws together lines of evidence to help seekers discover why they should be Catholic as an alternative.Why I Am Catholic serves as a compelling reproposal of the Church for former Catholics, a persuasive argument for truth and beauty to those who have become jaded and disenchanted with religion, and at the same time offers practicing Catholics a much-needed dose of confidence and clarity to affirm their faith against an increasingly skeptical culture.