Luce issues a revolutionary wake-up call to the church and home about the cultural battle for America's teens' hearts, minds, and souls.

    Explains how the Jews and the Church are God's people.

    Many have attempted to explain this singular success as a result of divine intervention. In this engaging book, David N. Myers charts the long journey of the Jews through history. At the same time, it points to two unlikely-and decidedly this-worldly--factors to explain the survival of the Jews: antisemitism and assimilation. Usually regarded as grave dangers, these two factors have continually interacted with one other to enable the persistence of the Jews. At every turn in their history, not just in the modern age, Jews have adapted to new environments, cultures, languages, and social norms. These bountiful encounters with host societies have exercised the cultural muscle of the Jews, preventing the atrophy that would have occurred if they had not interacted so extensively with the non-Jewish world. It is through these encounters--indeed, through a process of assimilation--that Jews came to develop distinct local customs, speak many different languages, and cultivate diverse musical, culinary, and intellectual traditions.Left unchecked, the Jews' well-honed ability to absorb from surrounding cultures might have led to their disappearance. And yet, the route toward full and unbridled assimilation was checked by the nearly constant presence of hatred toward the Jew. Anti-Jewish expression and actions have regularly accompanied Jews throughout history. Part of the ironic success of antisemitism is its malleability, its talent in assuming new forms and portraying the Jew in diverse and often contradictory images--for example, at once the arch-capitalist and revolutionary Communist. Antisemitism not only served to blunt further assimilation, but, in a paradoxical twist, affirmed the Jew's sense of difference from the host society. And thus together assimilation and antisemitism (at least up to a certain limit) contribute to the survival of the Jews as a highly adaptable and yet distinct group.

    A miracle of brevity, it guides readers through the world's oldest practicing religion with all the power, clarity and wit of Wouk's celebrated novels.

    F.X. Schouppe, S.J., (Purgatory—Explained by the Lives and Legends of the Saints), has written here a similar book on the subject of Hell. While the basic Catholic doctrines on Hell are reviewed, he mainly recounts numerous true stories that reinforce belief in Hell and the eternity of its horrors. The subject of Hell is frightening but the purpose of this work is not sensationalistic or to terrify, but rather to present lucidly to readers the reality of Hell and to instill in them a firm dread of the loss of Heaven.We trust that reading this short volume will motivate many in their faith, bring others back to God and help people truly desire Salvation.

    It is a meditation on the infinite love of God and the infinite value of the human individual. Not only are we in God's hands, says Desmond Tutu, our names are engraved on the palms of God's hands. Throughout an often turbulent life, Archbishop Tutu has fought for justice and against oppression and prejudice. As we learn in this book, what has driven him forward is an unshakeable belief that human beings are created in the image of God and are infinitely valuable. Each one of us is a God-carrier, a tabernacle, a sanctuary of the Divine Trinity. God loves us not because we are loveable but because he first loved us. And this turns our values upside down. In this sense, the Gospel is the most radical thing imaginable.It is extremely moving that in this book Archbishop Tutu returns to something so simple and so profound after a life in which he has been involved in political, social, and ethical issues that have seemed to be so very complex.

    In 2007, two Israeli news publications, Israel Today and News First Class reported that the most famous Rabbi in Israel's modern history, 108-year-old Yitzhak Kaduri, had left a cryptic death note revealing the name of the long-awaited Messiah. Within a year after the rabbi's death, the note was reported to have been verified as authentic by some of Kaduri's closest followers and then placed on Kaduri's own website (Kaduri.net). The purported Kaduri message proclaimed that Messiah's name was Yehoshua, or Jesus.  Its significance shocked the religious world. Shortly thereafter the furor began. The note immediately disappeared from Kaduri's website. The media refused to report further upon the matter. The Kaduri family, and several others close to the Kaduri ministry, began to claim that the note was a forgery or a mere fabrication - a cruel joke. Now, author, senior pastor, radio talk show host, and former law enforcement officer Carl Gallups, uses his biblical knowledge and journalistic and investigative skills to explore the matter inside and out. His thorough and balanced reporting of the documented facts of the case will astound you. Messianic Rabbi Jonathan Cahn, author of The Harbinger, several renowned biblical experts, as well as former students of Kaduri's rabbinical training school weigh in on the case. Gallup's exciting detailed reporting reaches startling conclusions that will amaze you. Mystical death-curses, visions of Messiah, an important world political figure under threat, religious leaders in shock, a cryptic death note, and more, this story is shocking, it is true and it is still unfolding. Did Rabbi Kaduri actually see and identify the real Messiah? From the publishers and the movie studio that brought you the best-selling documentary The Isaiah 9:10 Judgment comes the story of The Rabbi Who Found Messiah.

    Even if the cage is removed, we keep pacing in the same timid limits. We are afraid to get out. And we think that the only way out is by endless striving and thinking. But this profound healer and spiritual master shows us another way. The Heart of the Enlightened, the sequel to the highly successful Taking Flight, contains more than two hundred of de Mello's favorite stories. Whether Buddhist tales, Hindu fables, Islamic sayings, or Christian parables, the stories de Mello has chosen are sure to seep through to the heart. They touch on relationships, human nature, service, spirituality, and enlightenment. These are stories to be read slowly and savored. They are the key to liberating us from all that would pen us in.

    Shows how to forgive in an active, healthy way by moving through a five-step process that renounces vengeance and retaliation but is not passive or self-abusive in any way.

    It spans the millennia and the continents - from India to Andalusia and from the bazaars of Cairo to the streets of Oxford. It takes you to unimagined places: to a Jewish kingdom in the mountains of southern Arabia; a Syrian synagogue glowing with radiant wall paintings; the palm groves of the Jewish dead in the Roman catacombs. And its voices ring loud and clear, from the severities and ecstasies of the Bible writers to the love poems of wine bibbers in a garden in Muslim Spain.And a great story unfolds. Not - as often imagined - of a culture apart, but of a Jewish world immersed in and imprinted by the peoples among whom they have dwelled, from the Egyptians to the Greeks, from the Arabs to the Christians. Which makes the story of the Jews everyone's story, too.

    Nearly a hundred years later, Justin, born and raised in New Jersey, knows little of his family beyond the Garden State.That changes in 2001 when he discovers that his grandfather's cousin, Padre Gaetano Catanoso, is a Vatican-certified miracle worker. After a life of serving the poor and founding an order of nuns, Gaetano had been approved by Pope John Paul II to become a saint, the first priest from Calabria ever to be canonized. A typically lapsed American Catholic, Justin embarks on a quest to connect with his extended family in southern Italy and, ultimately, to awaken his slumbering faith.My Cousin the Saint charts the parallel history of two relatives—Justin's grandfather, Carmelo, and his sainted cousin, Gaetano. While Carmelo leaves his homeland to pursue New World prosperity, Gaetano stays behind to relieve Old World misery. Justin reunites the two halves of a sundered family by both exploring the life of the saint in Calabria and uncovering the untold story of his grandfather's family, raised in New Jersey between two world wars.Justin confronts his own tenuous spiritual moorings in the process. After meeting with Vatican officials in Rome, he is astonished by the complexity of saint-making. After hearing one miracle story after another, he struggles with the line between the mystical and the divine. After seeing his brother fall ill with terminal cancer, he questions the value of prayer. And after reveling in the charm and generosity of his newfound Italian relatives, he comes to learn what it means to have a saint in the family.A compelling narrative written with grace and honesty, My Cousin the Saint is a testament to the challenge of being Catholic in twenty-first-century America. More than a biography, more than an immigrant memoir, more than a chronicle of renewed faith, it is a love letter to a family now reunited across oceans and years.

    Here are Miriam, Esther, Dinah, Lilith and many other women of the Torah in dialogue with Jewish daughters, mothers and grandmothers, past and present. Together these voices examine and debate every aspect of a Jewish woman's life -- work, sex, marriage, her connection to God and her place in the Jewish community and in the world. The Five Books of Miriam makes an invaluable contribution to Torah study and adds rich dimension to the ongoing conversation between Jewish women and Jewish tradition.