We all expected to become missionary priests with a mission to assist the rural black people in the Southern half of the US. This was the master plan laid out by the founder of the religious order, Missionary Servants of the Most Holy Trinity, Father Thomas Augustine Judge. Third book coming soon, a mystery: Death in Pere Cheney Cemetery.

This book represents a stage on a journey. For almost a decade the three of us have been conducting retreat/workshops (R/W) based on the Gospel as illuminated through the Jungian personality types. The Myers-Briggs Indicator has been the instrument employed in these programs for helping participants to identify their types.

Do you need a break from the demands and pressures of daily life? Spending a weekend, a few days, or even just an hour away from the world may be exactly what you need to renew your spirit. Going on spiritual journeys and retreats is not new-people have been going on pilgrimages and journeying to sacred shrines for centuries. Florida's modern options include monasteries, spiritual retreat centers, and unique religious sites in peaceful, secluded, and spiritually nurturing settings that you can enjoy individually or in groups.

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.”

Calhoun was born a “true son of the Deep South.” He came of age during the Great Depression and learned to plow a mule. He became an astute observer of, and participant in, race relations in the ’40s and ’50s, was almost a moonshiner, lived as a sharecropper, and married the girl of his dreams. The latter part of the book has to do with the situations and people he met in his various jobs, mainly with his railroad days. It’s a wonder he’s around to relate all these tales!

To Train His Soul in Books explores numerous aspects of this rich religious culture, extending previous lines of scholarly investigation and demonstrating the activity of Syriac-speaking scribes and translators busy assembling books for the training of biblical interpreters, ascetics, and learned clergy.