Dorothy Day connected radical faith with doing radical deeds. Beginning from her discovery of God in the Word when she was eight years old, Michael Boover shares Dorothy’s reflections about her pilgrimage to the daily discipline of readiness and openness to God in her life, especially to God in her neighbor. He shares her words on why and how she prays, on her preference for frequent confession, on her intentional choice of suffering and poverty, and on her desire to imitate the saints and to make sanctity the norm of everyone’s life. In these 15 days, we see how Dorothy’s discipline gave her true freedom. In particular, it allowed her to give priority to Love – to take the most direct route to God by loving her neighbor. She recognized “the paucity of her own best spiritual efforts and took refuge in the fact that God would do for believers what they could not fully do for themselves.” Boover’s practical exercises emulate Day’s own temperament. They push you to live with more integrity and deeper love, and they show a deep compassion for the difficulty of the challenge.

Makes a five-hundred-year-old wisdom tradition accessible to contemporary readers seeking daily guidance on life and how to live it How can I find meaning and joy? How can I think clearly? What’s valuable in life, and what’s irrelevant? How do we manage anger? What can we do about envy, laziness, resentment? How do I know what matters most? What do I really want? These are the questions that lie at the heart of Ignatian spirituality, the five-hundred-year-old wisdom tradition that has shown leaders, seekers, and doers the way to live a better life. The daily readings in this book emphasize answers to pressing questions about satisfaction in work and relationships. St. Ignatius and his friends believed that “God is found in all things” and “love is best expressed in deeds rather than words.” The Ignatian way is profoundly practical. It guides us through the great challenge of life — finding God and finding our place in God’s work to save and heal the world.

One October day in Trent during World War II, Chiara Lubich was with her friends, and a bombing raid began. They couldn’t make it to the bomb shelter, so they took cover in the cellar. As the house shook over their heads and the bombs fell all around them, they were convinced that they were going to die at that moment. Lubich asked: is there something we could do right now at the moment of our death that would be especially pleasing to God? They opened the Gospel at random and read: “This I command you: that you love one another” (John 15:17). These friends made a pact among themselves of “mutual love.” They promised to love one another as Jesus had loved them and to make this particular commandment the basis of all that they did. So, while some Christians emphasize the apostolic mandate to go out and preach to all nations, baptizing them, Lubich emphasized John’s mandate for those who came to be part of the Focolare Movement (the ecclesial movement that grew up around Lubich): “This is how all will know that you are my disciples, if you have love for one another.” (John 13:35) The excerpts from Chiara Lubich’s writings that are collected here reflect the deep union with God that she experienced individually and as part of the Body of Christ as she put this “pearl” of the Gospel into practice.

By any measure, Dorothy Day lived a fascinating life. She was a journalist, activist, single mother, convert, Catholic laywoman, and co-founder of the Catholic Worker Movement. A lifelong radical who took the gospels at their word, Dorothy Day lived among the poor as one of them, challenging both church and state to build a better world for all people. Steeped in prayer, the liturgy, and the spiritual life, she was jailed repeatedly for protesting poverty, injustice, and war. Through it all, she created a sense of community and remained down-to-earth and humanly approachable. To have known Dorothy Day was to have experienced not only her charm and humanity, but the purposefulness of her life. In Dorothy Day: Love in Action, Patrick Jordan--who knew her personally--conveys some of the hallmarks of Day's fascinating life and the spirit her adventure inspires. People of God is a series of inspiring biographies for the general reader. Each volume offers a compelling and honest narrative of the life of an important twentieth or twenty-first century Catholic. Some living and some now deceased, each of these women and men has known challenges and weaknesses familiar to most of us but responded to them in ways that call us to our own forms of heroism. Each offers a credible and concrete witness of faith, hope, and love to people of our own day.

A stirring chronicle of the spiritual life of a nation, Prayer in America shows how the faith of Americans—from the founding fathers to corporate tycoons, from composers to social reformers, from generals to slaves—was an essential ingredient in the formation of American culture, character, commerce, and creed. Prayer in America brings together the country’s hymns, patriotic anthems, arts, and literature as a framework for telling the story of the innermost thoughts of the people who have shaped the United States we know today. Beginning with Native Americans, Prayer in America traces the prayer lives of Quakers and Shakers, Sikhs and Muslims, Catholics and Jews, from their earliest days in the United States through the aftermath of 9/11, and the 2004 presidential election. It probes the approach to prayer by such diverse individuals as Benjamin Franklin, Elvis Presley, Frank Lloyd Wright, J. C. Penney, P. T. Barnum, Jackie Robinson, and Christopher Columbus. It includes every president of the United States as well as America’s clergy, immigrants, industrialists, miners, sports heroes, and scientists. Prayer in America shows that without prayer, the political, cultural, social, and even economic and military history of the United States would be vastly different from what it is today. It engages in a thoughtful, timely examination of the modern debate over public prayer and how the current approach to prayer bears deep roots in the philosophies of the country’s founding fathers, a subject which remains distinct from the debate over church and state.

The Apostle Paul: more letters in the New Testament come from his hand than from anyone else. He is the leader whose dramatic conversion God used to rock the early church and whose tireless efforts helped spread the gospel to the Gentiles. His letters, inspired by the Holy Spirit, continue to radiate joy and deliver wisdom, even today. In Letters of Paul in 30 Days, author and teacher Trevin Wax has crafted a devotional experience that takes you through the letters of Paul to the early church in a “Morning,” “Midday,” and “Evening” pattern, following the Scriptural precedent for praying three times a day. This prayer journey through Paul’s letters features psalms, other songs from Scripture, confessions of faith, and written prayers from faithful Christians who have gone before us. Here is a guide to walking alongside Paul for a month by lifting our eyes, three times a day, to see and encounter the Savior who stands at the center of all his letters. Letters of Paul in 30 Days features the highly readable, highly reliable text of the Christian Standard Bible® (CSB). The CSB stays as literal as possible to the Bible's original meaning without sacrificing clarity, making it easier to engage with Scripture's life-transforming message and to share it with others.

This book provides a multidisciplinary commentary on a wide range of religious traditions and their relationship to acts of violence. Hate and violence occur at every level of human interaction, as do peace and compassion. Scholars of religion have a particular obligation to make sense out of this situation, tracing its history and variables, and drawing lessons for the future. From the formative periods of the religious traditions to their application in the contemporary world, the essays in this volume interrogate the views on violence found within the traditions and provide examples of religious practices that exacerbate or ameliorate situations of conflict.

An invaluable resource for anyone who regularly prepares prayers for public worship, guiding intercessors around the globe and helping them find the words to pray for the wider world.

Born in Boston of immigrant parents, Thomas A. Judge, CM (1868-1933) preached up and down the east coast on the Vincentian mission band between 1903 and 1915. Disturbed by the “leakage” of the immigrant poor from the church, he enlisted and organized lay women he met on the missions to work for the “preservation of the faith,” his watchword. His work grew apace with, and in some ways anticipated, the growing body of papal teaching on the lay apostolate. When he became superior of the godforsaken Vincentian Alabama mission in 1915, he invited the lay apostles to come south to help. “This is the layman’s hour,” he wrote in 1919. By then, however, many of his lay apostles had evolved in the direction of vowed communal life. This pioneer of the lay apostle founded two religious communities, one of women and one of men. With the indispensable help of his co-founder, Mother Boniface Keasey, he spent the last decade of his life trying to gain canonical approval for these groups, organizing them, and helping them learn “to train the work-a-day man and woman into an apostle, to cause each to be alert to the interests of the Church, to be the Church.” The roaring twenties saw the work expanded beyond the Alabama missions as far as Puerto Rico, which Judge viewed as a gateway to Latin America. The Great Depression ended this expansive mood and time and put agonizing pressure on Judge, his disciples, and their work. In 1932, the year before Judge’s death, the apostolic delegate, upon being appraised of Judge’s financial straits, described his work as “the only organized movement of its kind in the Church today that so completely meets the wishes of the Holy Father with reference to the Lay Apostolate.”

ISBN: 0060657528 ; $18.95.