Lehner reintroduces Christians to the true God—not the polite, easygoing, divine therapist who doesn’t ask much of us, but the Almighty God who is unpredictable, awe-inspiring, and demands our entire lives.  Stripping away the niceties with a sling blade, Lehner shows that God is more strange and beautiful than we imagine, and wants to know and transform us in the most intimate way. With his iconoclastic new book God Is Not Nice, Lehner, one of the most promising young Catholic theologians in America, challenges the God of popular culture and many of our churches and reintroduces the God of the Bible and traditional Christianity. As Lehner writes in the book’s introduction, "We all need the vaccine of the true transforming and mysterious character of God: The God who shows up in burning bushes, speaks through donkeys, drives demons into pigs, throws Saul from his horse, and appears to St. Francis. It’s only this God who has the power to challenge us, change us, and make our lives dangerous. He sweeps us into a great adventure that will make us into different people." This book is not safe. It may startle and annoy many people—including those who purport to teach and preach the Gospel, but are missing it, according to Lehner. God Is Not Nice intends to overthrow all of our popular misconceptions about God, inviting us to ask deeper questions about the nature of our lives and our relationship with him. When you're finished with God Is Not Nice, you may find the idols you constructed in God’s name smashed, replaced with a God who will ask you to live an entirely different life full of hope and transformation.God Is Not Nice has been translated into several foreign languages.

    Ronald Rolheiser’s most beloved books, leads us to a deeper experience of the beauty and poetry of Christian spirituality.

    Rather than “covering” this theme, he uncovers it, exposing the infinity and mystery of its breadth. His words return us home to the dignity of silence, the profundity of stillness, the power of thought and perception, and the eternal grace and generosity of beauty’s presence. In this masterful and revelatory work, O’Donohue encourages our greater intimacy with beauty, and celebrates it for what it really is: a homecoming of the human spirit.

    Josemaría’s rich interior life and extensive experience as a pastor. Aphoristic and perfect for meditation, Furrow was written in order to encourage and ease personal prayer. These 1000 points for spiritual reflection are directed toward the whole human person: body and soul, nature and grace. With the skillful hand of an experienced and holy priest, St. Josemaría interweaves the divine and human and helps you see how to bring them into harmony in your own life.

    Now, two decades later, here is her masterwork: WOMEN FOOD AND GOD. The way you eat is inseparable from your core beliefs about being alive. No matter how sophisticated or wise or enlightened you believe you are, how you eat tells all. The world is on your plate. When you begin to understand what prompts you to use food as a way to numb or distract yourself, the process takes you deeper into realms of spirit and to the bright center of your own life. Rather than getting rid of or instantly changing your conflicted relationship with food, Women Food and God is about welcoming what is already here, and contacting the part of yourself that is already whole—divinity itself.

    The book's chapters take the form of lay meditations on Catholic teaching and practice, opening up in practical and simple terms the richness at work in virtually every detail of Catholic prayer, piety, liturgy and experience.

    It is in this framework that we need to consider our present economic plight and the charting of our path forward.In his penetrating analysis of contemporary society, author John Horvat focuses on the present crisis with great insight and clarity. He claims modern economy has become cold, impersonal, and out of balance. Gone are the human elements of honor and trust so essential to our daily lives. Society has discarded the natural restraining influence of the human institutions and values that should temper our economic activities.Return to Order is a clarion call that invites us to reconnect with those institutions and values by applying the timeless principles of an organic Christian order. Horvat presents a refreshing picture of this order, so wonderfully adapted to our human nature. He describes the calming influence of those natural regulating institutions such as custom, family, community, the Christian State, and the Church.A return to order is not only possible but crucial. Horvat shows us how to make it happen.Based on nearly twenty years of ground-breaking research, this book is being recognized as one of the most important and influential on the subject to be published in the past ten years. Its original insight into both the present crisis and remedies for the future thrust Return to Order into the center of the raging debate over how to restore America to prominence as a proud and great nation.

    The word "sloth," however, can be misleading, for acedia is not laziness; in fact it can manifest as busyness or activism. Rather, acedia is a gloomy combination of weariness, sadness, and a lack of purposefulness. It robs a person of his capacity for joy and leaves him feeling empty, or void of meaningAbbot Nault says that acedia is the most oppressive of demons. Although its name harkens back to antiquity and the Middle Ages, and seems to have been largely forgotten, acedia is experienced by countless modern people who describe their condition as depression, melancholy, burn-out, or even mid-life crisis.He begins his study of acedia by tracing the wisdom of the Church on the subject from the Desert Fathers to Saint Thomas Aquinas. He shows how acedia afflicts persons in all states of life-- priests, religious, and married or single laymen. He details not only the symptoms and effects of acedia, but also remedies for it.

    We measure our worth by what others think of us. We compare and strive, existing mostly for the approval of others. Pressure rises, anxiety creeps in and we hustle to keep up.Jesus whispers, I gave my life to set you free. I gave you purpose. I called you to live in freedom in that purpose. Yet we still hobble through life, afraid to confess all the ways we push against this truth, because we can’t even believe it. We continue to grasp for the approval of anyone that will offer it: whether strangers, friends, or community.Christ doesn’t say you can be or may be or will be free. He says you are free. Dare you believe it?In You Are Free, Rebekah invites you to:• Overcome the exhaustion of trying to meet the expectations of others and rest in the joy God’s freedom brings.• Release stress, anxiety and worry, to uncover the peace that comes from abiding in His presence.• Find permission to grieve past experiences, confess areas of brokenness, and receive strength in your journey towards healing.• Throw off self-condemnation, burn superficial masks and step boldly into what our good God has for you.• Discover the courage to begin again and use your newfound freedom to set others free.Freedom is for everyone who wants it—the lost, the wounded, and those weary from all of the striving. It’s for those who gave up trying years ago. It’s for those angry and hurt, brilliant and burnt by the Christian song and dance. You are the church, the people of God. You were meant to be free.

    Drawing inspiration from the shells on the shore, Lindbergh’s musings on the shape of a woman’s life bring new understanding to both men and women at any stage of life. A mother of five, an acclaimed writer and a pioneering aviator, Lindbergh casts an unsentimental eye on the trappings of modernity that threaten to overwhelm us: the time-saving gadgets that complicate rather than simplify, the multiple commitments that take us from our families. And by recording her thoughts during a brief escape from everyday demands, she helps readers find a space for contemplation and creativity within their own lives.With great wisdom and insight Lindbergh describes the shifting shapes of relationships and marriage, presenting a vision of life as it is lived in an enduring and evolving partnership. A groundbreaking, best-selling work when it was originally published in 1955, Gift from the Sea continues to be discovered by new generations of readers. With a new introduction by Lindbergh’s daughter Reeve, this fiftieth-anniversary edition will give those who are revisiting the book and those who are coming upon it for the first time fresh insight into the life of this remarkable woman.The sea and the beach are elements that have been woven throughout Anne Morrow Lindbergh’s life. She spent her childhood summers with her family on a Maine island. After her marriage to Charles Lindbergh in 1929, she accompanied him on his survey flights around the North Atlantic to launch the first transoceanic airlines. The Lindberghs eventually established a permanent home on the Connecticut coast, where they lived quietly, wrote books and raised their family.After the children left home for lives of their own, the Lindberghs traveled extensively to Africa and the Pacific for environmental research.

    Augustine Tolton (1854-1897) was the first black priest in the United States. Born into a black Catholic slave family, Father Tolton conquered almost insurmountable odds to become a Catholic priest, and at his early death at 43, this pioneer black American priest left behind a shining legacy of holy service to God, the Church and his people.With the thorough scholarly research and inspirational writing by Sister Caroline Hemesath, the great legacy of this first black priest, and his courage in the face of incredible prejudice within the Church and society, will be a source of strength and hope for modern Christians who face persecution for their faith, especially black Catholics who still experience similar prejudices. In American history, many black people have achieved, against great odds, success and made distinct contributions to our society and their fellowman. But Father Tolton faced a different source of prejudice—an opposition from within the Church, the one institution he should have been able to rely on for compassion and support.He endured many rebuffs, as a janitor spent long hours in the church chapel in prayer, and attended clandestine classes taught by friendly priests and nuns who saw in his eyes the bright spark of the love of God, devotion to the Church and a determination to serve his people. Denied theological training in America, these friends helped him to receive his priestly education, and ordination, in Rome. He later became the pastor of St. Monica's Church in Chicago and established a center at St. Monica's which was the focal point for the life of black Catholics in Chicago for 30 years.The author interviewed many people who knew Father Tolton personally, including St. Katharine Drexel, and presents a deeply inspiring portrait of a great American Catholic.Within this book are various illustrations and photographs.

     Gerald G. May, MD, one of the great spiritual teachers and writers of our time, argues that the dark 'shadow' side of the true spiritual life has been trivialised and neglected to our serious detriment. Superficial and naively upbeat spirituality does not heal and enrich the soul. Nor does the other tendency to relegate deep spiritual growth to only mystics and saints. Only the honest, sometimes difficult encounters with what Christian spirituality has called and described in helpful detail as 'the dark night of the soul' can lead to true spiritual wholeness. May emphasises that the dark night is not necessarily a time of suffering and near despair, but a time of deep transition, a search for new orientation when things are clouded and full of mystery. The dark gives depth, dimension and fullness to the spiritual life.

    This marvelous book will show you how to read the signs of the times and prepare you to bear yourself as a Christian no matter what the future holds. "Reading this book was one of the greatest graces of my life!" St. Therese of Lisieux

    Home schooling well may be the salvation of our entire society.

    "God did not make us," he says. "We made God." He explains the ways in which religion is immoral: We damage our children by indoctrinating them. It is a cause of sexual repression, violence, and ignorance. It is a distortion of our origins and the cosmos. In the place of religion, Hitchens offers the promise of a new enlightenment through science and reason, a realm in which hope and wonder can be found through a strand of DNA or a gaze through the Hubble Telescope. As Hitchens sees it, you needn't get the blues once you discover the heavens are empty.