The title of this book, Very Short Reflections--for Advent and Christmas, Lent and Easter, Ordinary Time and Saints--through the Liturgical Year, accurately describes its contents. Chapter 1 presents a short reflection for every day of the Advent Season. Chapter 2 does the same for every day of the Christmas season. Lent is covered in chapter 3, the Sacred Paschal Triduum in chapter 4, and the fifty days of the Easter season in chapter 5. Chapter 6 covers Ordinary Time. And chapter 7 presents a short reflection for every solemnity, feast, and memorial of saints, whose special day falls during the liturgical year. The short reflections are based on sets of Mass texts--Entrance Antiphon, Collect, Prayer over the Offerings, Preface, Communion Antiphon, Prayer after Communion, and Prayer over the People--presented for every day of Advent and Christmas, Lent and Easter, Ordinary Time and saints in The Roman Missal. The reflection identifies the theme of the day and presents how it is manifested in the Mass texts. These very short reflections are designed to expose to the reader the liturgical spirituality that emanates from the Mass texts.

In My Life of Ministry, Writing, Teaching, and Traveling: The Autobiography of an Old Mines Missionary, I present my life as a child growing up in a French village about sixty miles south of St. Louis in the middle of the twentieth century. After eighteen years of life in Old Mines, the oldest settlement in the state of Missouri, I moved to St. Louis for four years and then to St. Meinrad, Indiana, for four years where education opened my eyes to a world very much larger than my village of origin. Life continued for me after ordination as a priest in the Roman Catholic Church in Springfield and Joplin, Missouri. Because my life is the thread stitching together this book, I have made it manageable by dividing it into four categories: ministry, writing, teaching, and travel. These categories contain the stories of others whose life threads of seventy years are woven into my lifetime tapestry. This is my autobiography--one of a missionary from Old Mines to the thirty-nine counties forming the southern third of the state of Missouri--composed during my seventieth year of life.

The Shelbydog Chronicles by Shelby Cole is a novel that illustrates what one brindle Labrador-Boxer mix, female dog says and thinks. With the help of Mark G. Boyer, who serves as the recorder of Shelby's words, Cole narrates the story of her life from birth, to puppyhood, into adulthood, and her life with several owners, including Boyer. Included in the thirteen chapters of this novel are Shelby's adventures and birthdays up to her tenth human year and sixty-seventh dog year. She also tells the story of how she came to live with Boyer and how he has become her translator from dog talk to English. This novel provides the readers--both dog-lovers and others--with a few hours of insight into what a dog says and what she thinks about through the years.

This book continues The Shelbydog Chronicles by Shelby Cole, in which Shelby, a sixty-pound Labrador-Boxer mix, narrates the events of the first ten years of her life. As she approaches her twelfth birthday, she has delegated her friend, Mark G. Boyer, to write More Shelbydog Chronicles. Boyer shares the experiences he has had with Shelbydog in twenty-seven short reflections with the goal of fostering reflection on how one’s life intersects with one’s pet. At the end of each chapter are reflection questions designed to help the readers get to know their pets better and get to know themselves better, too. Just as Shelbydog has changed Boyer’s physical and spiritual life, the readers will become aware of how their pets have changed their own physical and spiritual lives.

This book presents forty-two reflections on biblical names for God in an abecedarian (A through Z) format. The names, terms by which God is known, are not biblically exhaustive. These entries present spiritual reflections, grounded in Scripture, with Psalm responses, questions for meditation and/or journaling, and prayers designed to nourish spirituality at any time. Beginning with Abba, Alpha, and Ancient One, individual entries continue through the alphabet to Yahweh and Zion. By reflecting on forty-two biblical names for God, the reader comes to know better the Holy One, and, in so doing, is transformed.

This is a book about spirituality for the solitary, those people who live alone. In the past they were known as hermits, eremites, and anchorites; today they are known as pioneers, mountain men and women, widows, widowers, and people who choose to live alone in the country or in the city. They spend their days like other ordinary people taking care of daily chores, but also spending some time in prayer and meditation. The solitary life is alive and well, and it appears in all world religions. The solitary seeks solitude for prayer, meditation, self-awareness, and personal development. Living alone in a house or apartment begins to transform one's life; a person sets off on the path of purpose, the path of integrity, the path of transcendence that lifts his or her heart, mind, and spirit to the divine presence, God, who transforms more and more as the solitary dives deeper and deeper. This book provides an in-depth exploration of spirituality for the solitary along with eight-part exercises designed to further enhance solitary spirituality. Included are prayers, psalms in contemporary English, and celebrations using natural things, such as water, oil, and fire.

This book presents one hundred reflections on the four seasons: spring, summer, autumn, and winter. The seasons of the year bring change to people. Winter heating gives way to spring and summer air conditioning. The new life of spring—trees leafing, bulbs blooming, grass growing—brought about by rain turns into summer maintenance. Summer maintenance diminishes as the autumn chill begins to spread across the land, and T-shirts and shorts are exchanged for sweaters and jeans. Coats are brought out of the closet and prepared to be worn as frost forms on the lawn, snow falls from the sky, and ice forms on water. The changes that take place outside of us also take place inside us. Without noticing, we discover ourselves adapting as we pass from one season to another. All the reflections provided in this book begin with biblical passages that mention each specific season or some event that occurs as part of the season. The passage is followed by a reflection, a Psalm response, questions for meditation and/or journaling, and prayers designed to nourish one’s spirituality. The yearly process of passing from one season to another brings about transformation in us of which we may not be aware.

Recent monographs on Johannine signs tend to focus on a single sign. Other studies that examine multiple signs mainly focus on the first half of John’s Gospel. In Christian circles, most preachers and believers remain preoccupied by the traditional view that John’s Gospel contains only seven signs. However, what constitutes a sign for John, and how signs function to achieve the purpose of the Gospel (John 20:30–31) is far from settled. Three features of this book explore important clues for solving this puzzle: (1) a fresh hypothesis that Jesus’s signs correspond to the four tabernacle signs (a pot of manna, Aaron’s staff, the bronze altar cover, and the bronze serpent), which makes sense given the tabernacle/temple theme of John’s Gospel; (2) a complete study that examines Johannine signs in the whole Gospel systematically to reveal how signs develop the book’s purpose; and (3) an adaptation of a sociolinguistic theory to examine the corresponding texts of the Old Testament and New Testament in light of how language functions in a social event. The author will show how Jesus’s signs fulfill the functions of the four tabernacle signs, and how Jesus’s crucifixion is the “all-inclusive” sign in witnessing to his identity.

Smothered with Inexhaustible Mercy: An Anthology of Poems represents almost fifty years of well-known spiritual master Mark G. Boyer’s poetry writing. After writing seventy books of prose on spirituality and history, he has collected over two hundred of his poems and divided them into nineteen chapters (collections). You will find poems on Alaska, Christmas, Colorado, day and night, Easter, friendship, ocean, seasons, wind and rain, and more. Over the years, a few were published in now out-of-print journals, magazines, newspapers, and books, but most are taken from his handwritten files and organized according to themes, arranged alphabetically in this book. The poetry lover will find a variety of styles, rhythm, and length in this collection of poems that delve into the insight of things and people, because there is also more than what is at first perceived. As the title indicates, the author hopes that this book of poems smothers the reader with inexhaustible mercy.

Living Parables: Today’s Versions presents parables in updated language and images. Biblical parables are culture-bound; they are embedded in images that were well-known to a Jewish culture. Jesus was a first-century, Jewish, Galilean peasant, and his concerns, speech, and idioms belong to that culture. His milieu is far removed from ours today. The images found in parables carried meaning that is lost on modern audiences. A simple example will suffice. In the Jewish world of the first century, leaven was considered to be corrupt because people did not understand how bacteria worked. On the most important day of the year—Passover—bread had to be unleavened, uncorrupted. Today, no one thinks of yeast in that way. If we want bread dough to rise, we need to leaven it. Therefore, what image might Jesus use today that carries some of the same cultural connotations that yeast or leaven carried in his world? Might he speak about Ebola virus or radioactivity? Those images carry the same negativity that yeast or leaven bore in his world. This book contains parables found in the New Testament in a form that Jesus might tell today.