Paul Wilkes has been a writer/journalist, a TV producer, a monastic, a hedonist, a friend of the famous, a family man, and ultimately a true prodigal son. With In Due Season, Wilkes, one of America's most respected writers on religious belief and spirituality, details his search for God--from his working class upbringing in Cleveland to giving up everything he owned and living with the poor to his hedonistic life among the rich and famous. Wilkes's inspiring life story is one of abysmal failure and ultimate triumph, of a faith in God, battered and tried in the crucible of his experience.

The image of the "cafeteria Catholic" -- one who blithely picks and chooses those doctrines that suit him -- is a staple of American culture. But are American Catholics really so nonchalant about how they integrate the ancient devotional practices of Catholicism with the everyday struggles of the modern world? For Sense of the Faithful, Jerome Baggett conducted 300 intensive interviews with members of six parishes to explore all aspects of this question. The book is an act of listening that allows ordinary Catholics to speak for themselves about how they understand their faith and how they draw upon it to find purpose in their lives. Many American Catholics, Baggett shows, do indeed have an uneasy relationship with the official teachings of the Church and struggle to live faithfully amidst the challenges of the modern world. But Baggett finds that it is a genuine struggle, one that reveals a dynamic and self-aware relationship to the Church's teachings. Moving beyond the simplistic categories of national surveys and the politically motivated pronouncements of pundits, Sense of the Faithful ultimately paints a more complex -- and more accurate -- portrait of what it is like to be Catholic in America today.

Throughout the second half of the twentieth century, sacramental theology has evolved as a discipline advancing comprehensive theories of sacraments and sacramentality as integral to the Christian faith while also studying the history and theology of the particular rites. Now, in the twenty-first century, the need for attention to the actual performance and specific social settings of sacramental worship has become well established. This makes the work of sacramental theology necessarily engaged with multiple, cross-disciplinary theories attentive to particular contexts, whether local, national, or global. Still, the divine human encounter at the heart of Christian symbol and ritual likewise beckons to philosophical–theological reflection. The essays in this volume begin with profound philosophical perspectives on the personal and communal sacramental experience, expanding from traditional cosmology to evolutionary and chaos theories of our planetary existence, continuing with shifts, especially among youth, to interreligious and non-institutional perspectives, consideration of change in popular notions of guilt, and social–ethical issues in relation to liturgical theology and practice, so as finally to return to fundamental theological reflection on human sacramentality and divine revelation.

If you are content with just getting by, this book is not for you. But if your life’s purpose is to reach God’s best for your life then this book can make a difference every day of your life. Not only that, it can help you to make a positive difference in the lives of others in your family, your church, and your organization. The life principles outlined in these pages are time tested, easily adaptable, and well proven. They work. They will work for you. Using solid Bible principles and inspiring life-transforming illustrations, Robert Leslie Holmes invites you to join him on a step-by-step ten point journey of faith and hope that will make life better for you and you better for life.

For the first time in 400 years the Catholic Church has authorized an official universal catechism which instantly became an international best-seller, The Catechism of the Catholic Church. Using this official Catechism, the highly-regarded author and professor Peter Kreeft presents a complete compendium of all the major beliefs of Catholicism written in his readable and concise style. Since The Catechism of the Catholic Church was written for the express purpose of grounding and fostering catechisms based on it for local needs and ordinary readers, Kreeft does just that, offering a thorough summary of Catholic doctrine, morality, and worship in a popular format with less technical language. He presents a systematic, organic synthesis of the essential and fundamental Catholic teachings in the light of the Second Vatican Council and the whole of the Church's Tradition. This book is the most thorough, complete and popular catechetical summary of Catholic belief in print that is based on the universal Catechism.

In a heartfelt invitation to lapsed or estranged Catholics, Mitch Finley takes a realistic look at the reasons people feel alienated, and proposes ways to overcome the anger, bitterness, and resentment so that they may return. Sixty million people in the United States claim a Catholic identity. The next largest group--approximately nine million--is made up of people who are "fallen away" Catholics. Mitch Finley addresses this audience, as well as parents struggling with the almost inevitable teenage rebellion against religion. Finley examines a wide variety of reasons Catholics choose to leave the Church, treating each one in a fair-minded way. He recounts dozens of true stories about people who left and returned, a few about those who have yet to return, and candidly acknowledges that many--perhaps most--active Catholics experience periods of estrangement. Asking forgiveness on behalf of the Church for the ways lapsed Catholics may have been hurt by the institution or its official representatives, he also reminds readers that forgiveness needs to go both ways. Encouraging Catholics to begin a new relationship with their religion, Finley suggests ways to become part of a parish once more. He also discusses the Church's obligations to those who have left, highlighting successful outreach programs. In guiding readers along the path from alienation to reconciliation, Finley shows that there are good reasons for "coming home again,"

Sexual abuse scandals, declining attendance, a meltdown in the number of priests and nuns, the closing of many parishes and parochial schools--all have shaken American Catholicism. Yet conservatives have increasingly dominated the church hierarchy. In The Catholic Labyrinth, Peter McDonough tells a tale of multiple struggles that animate various groups--the Survivors Network of those Abused by Priests, Voice of the Faithful, and the Leadership Roundtable chief among them--pushing to modernize the church. One contest pits reformers against those who back age-old standards of sexual behavior and gender roles. Another area of contention, involving efforts to maintain the church's far-flung operations in education, social services, and healthcare, raises constitutional issues about the separation of church and state. Once a sidebar to this debate, the bishops' campaign to control the terms of employment and access to contraceptives in church-sponsored ministries has fueled conflict further. McDonough draws on behind-the-scenes documentation and personal interviews with leading reformers and "loyalists" to explore how both retrenchment and resistance to clericalism have played out in American Catholicism. Despite growing support for optional celibacy among priests, the ordination of women, and similar changes, and in the midst of numerous departures from the church, immigration and a lingering reaction against the upheavals of the sixties have helped sustain a popular traditionalism among "Catholics in the pews." So have the polemics of Catholic neoconservatives. These demographic and cultural factors--as well as the silent dissent of those who simply ignore rather than oppose the church's more regressive positions--have reinforced a culture of deference that impedes reform. At the same time, selective managerial improvements show promise of advancing incremental change. Timely and incisive, The Catholic Labyrinth captures the church at a historical crossroads, as advocates for change struggle to reconcile religious mores with the challenges of modernity.