Once in a generation a historian will redefine his field, producing a book that demands to be read--a product of electrifying scholarship conveyed with commanding skill. Diarmaid MacCulloch's Christianity is such a book. Ambitious, it ranges back to the origins of the Hebrew Bible & covers the world, following the three main strands of the Christian faith. Christianity will teach modern readers things that have been lost in time about how Jesus' message spread & how the New Testament was formed. It follows the Christian story to all corners of the globe, filling in often neglected accounts of conversions & confrontations in Africa & Asia. It discovers the roots of the faith that galvanized America, charting the rise of the evangelical movement from its origins in Germany & England. This book encompasses all of intellectual history--we meet monks & crusaders, heretics & saints, slave traders & abolitionists, & discover Christianity's essential role in driving the Enlightenment & the age of exploration, & shaping the course of WWI & WWII.We live in a time of tremendous religious awareness, when both believers & non-believers are engaged by questions of religion & tradition, seeking to understand the violence sometimes perpetrated in the name of God. The son of an Anglican clergyman, MacCulloch writes with feeling about faith. His last book, The Reformation, was chosen by dozens of publications as Best Book of the Year & won the Nat'l Book Critics Circle Award. This inspiring follow-up is a landmark new history of the faith that continues to shape the world.

    And he offers an unusual "insider's view" of learning how to think well for the glory of God and for the sake of his kingdom. In Habits of the Mind Sire challenges you to avoid one of the greatest pitfalls of intellectual life--by resisting the temptation to separate being from knowing. He shows you how to cultivate intellectual virtues and disciplines--habits of mind--that will strengthen you in pursuit of your calling. And he offers assurance that intellectual life can be a true calling for Christians: because Jesus was the smartest man who ever lived, Sire argues, you can and should accept the challenge to think as well as you are able.

    These tugged in different ways not only on celebrated thinkers such as Machiavelli, Montaigne, Hobbes, and Pascal, but on men and women at every level of society whose voices we hear through their diaries, letters, and court records.Ryrie traces the roots of atheism born of anger, a sentiment familiar to anyone who has ever cursed a corrupt priest, and of doubt born of anxiety, as Christians discovered their faith was flimsier than they had believed. As the Reformation eroded time-honored certainties, Protestant radicals defended their faith by redefining it in terms of ethics. In the process they set in motion secularizing forces that soon became transformational. Unbelievers tells a powerful emotional history of doubt with potent lessons for our own angry and anxious age.

    With unprecedented cooperation from John Paul II and the people who knew and worked with him throughout his life, George Weigel offers a groundbreaking portrait of the Pope as a man, a thinker, and a leader whose religious convictions defined a new approach to world politics—and changed the course of history. As even his critics concede, John Paul II occupied a unique place on the world stage and put down intellectual markers that no one could ignore or avoid as humanity entered a new millennium fraught with possibility and danger.The Pope was a man of prodigious energy who played a crucial, yet insufficiently explored, role in some of the most momentous events of our time, including the collapse of European communism, the quest for peace in the Middle East, and the democratic transformation of Latin America. With an updated preface, this edition of Witness to Hope explains how this “man from a far country” did all of that, and much more—and what both his accomplishments and the unfinished business of his pontificate mean for the future of the Church and the world.

    It combines authoritative research with a captivating style to bring our heritage home to us.

    The explanation for this current fixation seems to lie in the contrary phenomenon—unhappiness. Despite the fact that we have tremendous access to every imaginable form of entertainment, we experience a pervading sense of insecurity, emptiness, and malaise amid sporadic peak experiences.The problem seems to lie less in the external environment than in the internal one. We seem, in the words of Viktor Frankl, to be suffering from an absence of meaning that pervades both individuals and societies, giving rise to a collective emptiness, loneliness, and alienation.Finding True Happiness attempts to provide a way out of this personal and cultural vacuum by helping people to identify and then reach for happiness. As Aristotle noted 2,400 years ago, happiness is the one thing we can choose for its own sake—everything else is chosen for the sake of happiness.After an exhaustive investigation of philosophical, psychological, and theological systems of happiness, author Fr. Spitzer developed the “Four Levels of Happiness”, which he based on the classical thinkers Plato, Aristotle, Augustine, and Aquinas; the contemporary philosophers Marcel, Scheler, Buber, Ricoeur, and Jaspers; and the modern psychologists Maslow, Frankl, Erikson, Seligman, Kohlberg and Gilligan.Finding True Happiness is both a philosophical itinerary and a practical guidebook for life’s most important journey—from the mundane and the meaningless to transcendent fulfillment No other book currently available combines such breadth of practical advice and such depth of philosophical, psychological, and spiritual wisdom.

    What can be done to stop this? Cardinal Timothy Dolan explains the need for all Americans to embrace a new culture rooted in what Blessed John Paul II called the Gospel of Life where the sacredness of all human life, and the freedoms that are their birthright, are upheld, respected and protected by law.

    The Lost History of Christianity unveils a vast and forgotten network of the world's largest and most influential Christian churches that existed to the east of the Roman Empire. These churches and their leaders ruled the Middle East for centuries and became the chief administrators and academics in the new Muslim empire. The author recounts the shocking history of how these churches—those that had the closest link to Jesus and the early church—died.Jenkins takes a stand against current scholars who assert that variant, alternative Christianities disappeared in the fourth and fifth centuries on the heels of a newly formed hierarchy under Constantine, intent on crushing unorthodox views. In reality, Jenkins says, the largest churches in the world were the “heretics” who lost the orthodoxy battles. These so-called heretics were in fact the most influential Christian groups throughout Asia, and their influence lasted an additional one thousand years beyond their supposed demise.Jenkins offers a new lens through which to view our world today, including the current conflicts in the Middle East, Asia, and Africa. Without this lost history, we lack an important element for understanding our collective religious past. By understanding the forgotten catastrophe that befell Christianity, we can appreciate the surprising new births that are occurring in our own time, once again making Christianity a true world religion.

    This book contains the full-length scripts of forty-four of those top-rated programs that drew thousands of letters weekly to Sheen from his viewers in response to the advice and insights he gave on his shows.Bishop Sheen's writings, tapes and videos are as popular today as when he was alive. His timeless insights offered in this book give wise, personal and inspiring guidance on the problems affecting our lives in today's world. His talks cover an amazing variety of subjects, from the character of the Irish to the handling of teen-agers. He discusses education, Christianity, relativity, and world affairs. He speaks about love, conscience, fear, motherhood, work. He tells amusing anecdotes, recites poetry, and ponders the fate of the free world as well as America's destiny.Among his many best-selling books, none has greater universal appeal than Life Is Worth Living. It offers a stirring and challenging statement of Bishop Sheen's whole philosophy of life and living. It is a book for everyone - of immediate concern to all people seeking understanding, belief, and purpose in these troubled times.

    It is a tradition that may at times, for Christians, feel strangely familiar and will, for Christians and Jews, always challenge you to see yourself and your world through a new lens."--from the IntroductionJewish spirituality is an approach to life that encourages us to become aware of God's presence and purpose, even in unlikely places. "This world and everything in it is a manifestation of God's presence," says Rabbi Lawrence Kushner. "Our challenge and goal is to find it and then act in such a way as to help others find it too."In this special book, Kushner guides Christians through the rich wisdom of Jewish spirituality. He tailors his unique style to address Christians' questions, and, in doing so, opens new windows on their own faith.Jewish Spirituality is a window into the Jewish soul that people of all faiths can understand and enjoy. From the Talmud and Torah, to "repentence" (teshuva) and "repairing the world" (tikkun olam), Kushner shows all of us how we can use the fundamentals of Jewish spirituality to enrich our own lives.

    Few, if any, have sought to explain the origin of all of these problems at once. In Catholic Republic, Timothy Gordon argues that America’s premature withering could have been avoided if only the founders had fully incorporated into the new republic the Catholic natural law. The anti-Catholic bias of 18th Century America kept our Protestant and Enlightenment forefathers from admitting their dependence upon the ideas of Aristotle, St. Thomas Aquinas, and the early Jesuits. In Catholic Republic, Gordon unpacks our nation’s complicated history of repudiating, yet borrowing, the Catholic ideas about politics and nature, which turn out to be indispensable to our—and all—republics.Indeed, America still can be saved. It is not too late.

    Donald H. Calloway, comes a powerful and comprehensive history of a spiritual weapon: the rosary.

    This book is the catechism (the word means "instruction") that will serve as the standarad for all future catechisms.The Catechism draws on the Bible, the Mass, the Sacraments, Church tradition and teaching, and the lives of saints. It comes with a complete index, footnotes and cross-references for a fuller understanding of every subject. Using the tradition of explaining what the Church believes (the Creed), what she celebrates (the Sacraments), what she lives (the Commandments), and what she prays (the Lord's Prayer), the Catechism of the Catholic Church offers challenges for believers and answers for all those interested in learning about the mystery of the Catholic faith. Here is a positive, coherent and contemporary map for our spiritual journey toward transformation.The Catechism of the Catholic Church is, as Pope John Paul II calls it, "a special gift."

    Looking beyond these troubles to “the splendor of truth” that constitutes the Church, he proposes a forward-thinking way of being Catholic in America. Drawing on his personal encounters with the late John Paul II and Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, now Pope Benedict XVI, Neuhaus describes their hope for a springtime of world evangelization, Christian unity, and Catholic renewal. Catholic Matters reveals a vibrant Church, strengthened and unified by hardship and on the cusp of a great revival in spiritual vitality and an even greater contribution to our common life.

    In fact, it's just gotten harder. With the recent election of our current Pope, a new wave of attacks is under way by the enemies of the Catholic Church. From this point forward, every Catholic will come face-to-face with the vicious anti-Catholic attacks that are being launched against the faith. Here at Catholic Answers, the most effective products for countering attacks and clearing up misunderstandings have been our tracts. They've been around since the beginning of the apostolate and have resulted in many thousands of conversions. These tracts provide a real point of contact for someone in discovering the truths of the Catholic faith. We've decided to compile seventy of the best tracts into one cohesive, comprehensive book that can be used by anyone, anytime, anywhere to defend the Catholic faith. "The Essential Catholic Survival Guide" is indexed according to topic in a unique question-and-answer format that allows the reader to find the right answer to any question instantly. It covers the questions and misconceptions people have about the Catholic faith on a variety of topics, including: * The Church and the papacy * Scripture and Tradition * Mary and the saints * The sacraments * Salvation * Last things * Morality and science * Anti-Catholicism * Non-Catholic churches and movements * Practical apologetics It's the essence of Catholic apologetics - all rolled up into one attractive, easy-to-use manual that is destined to become the most effective tool of its kind.