I am proud to know the author of this book, which is the best I have ever seen on the Rosary. Greg spent many years studying about the Rosary. His description of the Fifteen Mysteries is the best I have ever seen. As a boy I prayed three Rosaries each day, and still do. For years I have given away 1,000 Rosaries each month. Now I am thrilled to send copies of this book to as many people as possible. - Daniel Lyons, The Spiritual Newsletter My dear friends, over the years I have given prayer to this writing. I would like to say that I have reached spiritual heights, but I have not. I would like to claim a perfect Christian life, but I am still growing. I want to say I pray the Rosary perfectly and have achieved a deep union with God, but I am still maturing. However, I have learned to walk with God and continually ask him to keep working with me (Mk. 16:20). For me, the Rosary has made me a better Christian, more Christ-like, a little more understanding about life and people. I look at this writing the same way the little child in the Scriptures looked at his five loaves and two fish he gave the Lord. It is a small offering (John 6:9ff).

Our sisters in the region requested this written history to have the opportunity to tell our stories and relate this history of our beginnings in Mexico. In this interesting historical narrative, I trust that you, the reader, will find that the paths of God are unexplainable. Providence uses many ways to carry out God’s plans. Our story begins with the five of us. As young women, we were called without a clear understanding about the invitation that we were receiving. But the Lord knew what he wanted from us. The invitation we received was to prepare ourselves to be better catechists without the clarity of a call or vocation to the consecrated life.

ON a hot August night in 1221 a saint whom the Church has designated as a “holy athlete of Christ” finished his course and gave up his soul to the God whom he had served, consistently and at great speed, for fifty-one years. Around him were grouped his sons, men of half a dozen nations, who ten years before had hardly heard of Dominic Guzman and now were quite willing to die for him. Like any father of any family, he spoke to them of their inheritance; not wealth, for he had not even a room in which to die nor a habit in which to be buried. But he left an immortal legacy, a blazing enthusiasm for God which the Christian world had not seen since the day of Pentecost. His testament was as simple and as potent as the Sermon on the Mount, and dealt with the same basic verities: “Have charity one for another; Guard humility; Make your treasure out of voluntary poverty.” For a little over seven hundred years, the sons and daughters of this man of God have tried to put into words something of the world-shaking force that was Dominic. No one has ever quite succeeded. Getting St. Dominic into print is like printing Fra Angelico in black and white. In view of this, it does not seem sanguine to judge that the time is ripe for a brief Life of St. Dominic in English. May it do its part in attracting to the Order fresh recruit. from the strata of humanity that Dominic most loved— the young and the courageous who will not shrink from the challenge implicit in St. Dominic’s words to Stephen of Spain as he clothed him with the habit of the Friars Preachers: “I give you arms, with which throughout your life you may fight against the devil.”

Religious studies and research has gained a lot of interest and considerable attention from researchers, policy makers, and practitioners during the last few years. Though interest has increased, religious tourism is vastly underrepresented in modern research and not much is known on the subject’s presence in most countries. Global Perspectives on Religious Tourism and Pilgrimage provides emerging research on religious tourism, the cultural impact of religion, and religiosity’s impact on new market products. Highlighting the prevalence of religiosity, readers will learn tourism’s impact on the world economy and the growing research in religious tourism, this book is an important resource for academic societies, entrepreneurs, policy makers, researchers, and educators.

This enduring work of Russian spirituality has charmed countless people with its tale of a nineteenth-century peasant's quest for the secret of prayer. Readers follow this anonymous pilgrim as he treks over the Steppes in search of the answer to the one compelling question: How does one pray constantly? Through his journeys, and under the tutelage of a spiritual father, he becomes gradually more open to the promptings of God, and sees joy and plenty wherever he goes. Ultimately, he discovers the different meanings and methods of prayer as he travels to his ultimate destination, Jerusalem. The Way of a Pilgrim is a humble story ripe for renewed appreciation today. The recent changes in Russia have revealed the great religious traditions of that land, and this work, freshly translated for modern times, is among the finest examples of those centuries-old traditions.

The rosary has been nearly ubiquitous among Roman Catholics since its first appearance in Europe five centuries ago. Why has this particular devotional object been so resilient, especially in the face of Catholicism's reinvention in the Early Modern, or "Counter-Reformation," Era? Nathan D. Mitchell argues in lyric prose that to understand the rosary's adaptability, it is essential to consider the changes Catholicism itself began to experience in the aftermath of the Reformation. Unlike many other scholars of this period, Mitchell argues that after the Reformation Catholicism actually became less retrenched and more open to change. This innovation was especially evident in the sometimes "subversive" visual representations of sacred subjects and in new ways of perceiving the relation between Catholic devotion and the liturgy's ritual symbols. The rosary played a crucial role not only in how Catholics gave flesh to their faith, but in new ways of constructing their personal and collective identity. Ultimately, Mitchell employs the history of the rosary as a lens through which to better understand early modern Catholic history.

Mother of Church Is a collection of writings and adsresses on Our Lady by Pope John Paul II. He has already given to the Church profound and inspiring doctrine on Our Lady. In his teaching he always sees Mary as inseparably linked to Christ and as intimately associated with the life and mission of Church. This has been clear from the very begining of his Pontificate when he placed his entire future ministry under Mary's maternal care. Pope John Paul's teaching on Mary is profoundly biblical in inspiration and we see in her real, living person, with human emotions and feelings. She lives by faith, proceeding step by step along her pilgrim way, at times in the midst of darkness. She also comes across to us as someone who fully shares day-to-day human concerns, while at the same time dedicating her whole being without reserve to God's transcendent purposes. She remains within reach. She is very near to each one of us, someone whose help we can rely on and whose virtues we can always look to as a model for our lives. -- BACK COVER.

Juan Francisco Manzano and Gabriel de la Concepción Valdés (Plácido) were perhaps the most important and innovative Cuban writers of African descent during the Spanish colonial era. Both nineteenth-century authors used Catholicism as a symbolic language for African-inspired spirituality. Likewise, Plácido and Manzano subverted the popular imagery of neoclassicism and Romanticism in order to envision black freedom in the tradition of the Haitian Revolution. Plácido and Manzano envisioned emancipation through the lens of African spirituality, a transformative moment in the history of Cuban letters. Matthew Pettway examines how the portrayal of African ideas of spirit and cosmos in otherwise conventional texts recur throughout early Cuban literature and became the basis for Manzano and Plácido’s antislavery philosophy. The portrayal of African-Atlantic religious ideas spurned the elite rationale that literature ought to be a barometer of highbrow cultural progress. Cuban debates about freedom and selfhood were never the exclusive domain of the white Creole elite. Pettway’s emphasis on African-inspired spirituality as a source of knowledge and a means to sacred authority for black Cuban writers deepens our understanding of Manzano and Plácido not as mere imitators but as aesthetic and political pioneers. As Pettway suggests, black Latin American authors did not abandon their African religious heritage to assimilate wholesale to the Catholic Church. By recognizing the wisdom of African ancestors, they procured power in the struggle for black liberation.