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All of us need to return to Nazareth.-- Pope Benedict XVI, from his visit to Nazareth, 2009After the best-selling archaeological biography Mary of Nazareth, Michael Hesemann sets out once again for the Holy Land, this time seeking traces of perhaps the most mysterious figure in human history: Jesus of Nazareth, whom Christians believe to be the Son of God, the Messiah.In this unique book, Hesemann walks the streets of Israel in order to put historical, archaeological, geographical, and script...

Before Austen Comes Aesop presents an in-depth examination of the Children's Great Books, that is, the literature that has made the most profound impact on the lives of children throughout Western history. In addition to its invaluable chronological list of titles, from ancient times to the present, the book provides both students and their parents the guidance they need to read leisurely or study formally the Children's Great Books at home. The book's premise is that children often do not sp...

Cur Deus Verba unfolds a systematic theology of Scripture from a single key question: What did God seek to accomplish by making the Bible? The answer requires seeing why the Holy Trinity made anything at all, why the Word became flesh, and finally why the Church needs an inspired text. As Christ is more fully man than any mere man, so his Church is more fully society than any merely human society. And as every society has its literary tradition, so the Church needed a canon of literature that...

Peter Kreeft presents a series of brilliant essays about many of the problems that undermine our Western civilization, along with ways to address them. "These essays are not new proposals or solutions to today's problems," he says. "They are old. They have been tried, and have worked. They have made people happy and good. That is what makes them so radical and so unusual today."In his witty, readable style, Kreeft implores us to gather wisdom and preserve it, as the monks did in the Middle Ag...

The fruit of much pastoral experience, this book addresses both perennial and current challenges facing Catholics, giving reasons for hope and joy. Touching on a wide range of topics, from prayer to evangelization, it offers insights into living the Catholic faith with humility and heroism as it focuses on the person of Jesus Christ--his identity, mission, and presence in our lives. Having been a pastor of souls in a variety of settings--the suburbs, the inner city, the mission field, and the...

The Catholic deposit of faith and tradition is wide and deep! There are so many different devotions and ways to pray that it's impossible for anyone to ever use them all, let alone in a busy family. Fortunately, the liturgical calendar is here to help!In this companion to her bestselling book about liturgical living traditions in the home, The Catholic All Year Compendium, Kendra Tierney lays out hundreds of prayers, devotions, practices, blessings, indulgences, novenas, hymns, Bible readings...

In this new book by bestselling author, Edward Sri, we discover the close connection between growing in the virtues and growing in friendship and community with others. A consummate teacher, Dr. Sri leads us through the virtues with engaging examples and an uncanny ability to anticipate and answer our most pressing questions. Dr. Sri shows us in his inimitable, easy-to-read style, that the virtues are the basic life skills we need to give the best of ourselves to God and to the people in our ...

This volume in the popular Ignatius Catholic Study Bible series leads readers through a penetrating study of Deuteronomy using the text itself and the Church's own guidelines for understanding the Bible.Ample notes accompany each page, providing fresh insights by renowned Scripture scholars Scott Hahn and Curtis Mitch as well as time-tested interpretations from the Fathers of the Church. These helpful study notes provide rich historical, cultural, geographical, and theological information per...

Music plays such an important part in everyone's life but how much do we know about the history of music? How did music shape our civilization and how was music itself shaped by the Catholic Church? Susan Treacy, an experienced professor of music, is an excellent guide to the history of music. Every Catholic should own at least one book on music. This is it.

"Rekindle the gift of God that is within you", Saint Paul urges Timothy years after his ordination (2 Tim 1:6). Drawing on sixty years of experience as a Catholic priest, Cistercian Fr. Roch Kereszty provides realistic spiritual, psychological, and pastoral guidance to priests and seminarians--from preaching and sacramental ministry, to parish life and spiritual direction, to chastity and poverty. Countless priests struggle to understand their role and identity in the post-conciliar Church, w...

Thérèse of Lisieux is one of the most popular modern saints in the world, but the details of her life and spirituality are still not widely known and are somewhat of a mystery even to her devoted followers.With over 150 stunning photographs, in-depth text, and plentiful sidebars on history, geography, and themes, this gorgeous work helps us enter into the universe of the greatest saint of modern times to discover the simplicity, yet depth of her daily life and of her relationships, both human...

This work is a profound and illuminating conversation between two Catholic artists who are also gifted writers. The setting is a house in the woods near Combermere, Canada. The two men are alone, free to explore the wellsprings of Christian art and the suffering that its creation entails.This moving discussion between the two artists and writers is not theoretical. It lays bare the anguish and the joy of a life lived in the service of an artist''s vocation. Includes an eight-page art insert.

Dr. Owen Whitfield is the elderly Oxford professor of history who first appeared in Michael O'Brien's novel The Father's Tale. In the events of The Sabbatical, which occur sometime later, Dr. Whitfield is looking forward to a sabbatical year of peace and quiet, gardening in his backyard, and tinkering with what he calls his latest unpublishable book. As the year begins, he is drawn by a series of seeming coincidences into involvement with a group of characters from across Europe, including a ...

Hollywood, 1956. Journalist and war widow Evangeline Kilhooley is assigned to write a star profile of the fading actor Bela Lugosi, made famous by his role as Count Dracula. During a series of interviews, Lugosi draws Evi into his curious Eastern European background, gradually revealing the link between Old World shadows and the twilight realm of modern horror films. Along the way, Evi meets another English expatriate, Hugo Radelle, a movie buff who offers to help with her research. As their ...

At his typewriter in little Cross Plains, Texas, Robert E. Howard created big characters--Bran Mak Morn, Solomon Kane, Conan the Barbarian--who shaped the art of fantasy fiction for generations. But Howard would never know it. On June 11, 1936, at the age of thirty, he shot himself outside his country home. Why would he do it, and where could death have taken him? Providence Blue imagines the strange underworld journey of Howard after his suicide, through Texas flatlands, ancient Egyptian rui...

With the luminous insight that we have come to expect from his writings, Robert Cardinal Sarah helps spouses rediscover the deep source of their love--God Himself--and the means for letting love between them grow.This book presents the essentials of a retreat that the cardinal preached to married couples in Lourdes, France. It is meant for all couples, including those who are struggling. There is a path to renewal for everyone, and couples in every situation can find again the preciousness of...

Italian Carmelite Antonio Maria Sicari''s vibrant biographies of saints--from Augustine to Catherine of Siena to Faustina Kowalska--have been read across Europe for decades. In How Saints Die, Sicari turns to the most difficult challenge in the life of a Christian: the hour of death.What he uncovers in this darkest moment, however, is not desolation, but inexplicable joy. I have recounted the death of many saints, he writes, but all of them have confirmed for me the truth of this ancient Chri...

In 2019, Peter Kreeft published Socrates'' Children, a four-volume series on the hundred greatest philosophers of all time, spanning from ancient Greece to contemporary Germany. But he made a terrible mistake: he somehow left out women, and with this, he overlooked the greatest mind of them all.He forgot her--a mysterious housewife from a desert village--because he had forgotten what "philosophy" means. "Philosophy is not the cultivation of cleverness," Kreeft explains, "or the sophistication...

What does the Bible really say about the birth of Jesus? How did the celebration of Christmas become associated with things like Santa Claus and decorated trees? In The True Meaning of Christmas: The Birth of Jesus and the Origins of the Season, biblical scholar Michael Patrick Barber offers an inspiring look at the Bible's accounts of Jesus'' birth and the development of the Christmas season. Along the way, he answers numerous questions, including: - How is the Christmas story related to anc...

"The disintegration of rational society started in the drift from the hearth and the family", wrote G. K. Chesterton in 1933. "The solution must be a drift back."In a world that has lost touch with normality, it takes a pioneer to rediscover the wonders of the normal. This masterful compilation of texts and quotes from the prolific G. K. Chesterton, edited by Dale Ahlquist, illustrates the glory of the family--the heritage of romance, love, marriage, parenthood, and home. It is a hymn in prai...

This book presents the chief insights concerning the mystery of atonement in the works of four theological guides: John Paul II, Joseph Ratzinger/Benedict XVI, Hans Urs von Balthasar, and Norbert Hoffmann.The author argues for the central importance and perennial value of a theology of atonement, even as she explains the modern aversion to it. The book's central aim is to deepen our understanding of the biblical claim that God shows himself to be love precisely by sending his Son as atonement...

"My Father, I put myself in your hands", wrote Charles de Foucauld in his journal. "Whatever you make of me, I thank you, I am ready for everything, I accept everything, I thank you for everything."When he was killed by bandits in 1916, the French aristocrat-turned-monk was virtually unknown. Over the course of a century, however, the radiance of Foucauld's hidden life has spread more and more, and the Church now recognizes him as a saint.His youth and early adulthood read like a novel--the l...

Saint John of the Cross is the Church's premier teacher on contemplative prayer. Catholic tradition even calls him the Mystical Doctor. The sixteenth-century Carmelite priest not only wrote four massive treatises on the spiritual life, along with some of the finest poetry in the Spanish language, but also worked alongside Teresa of Ávila in renewing the Carmelite order. Thérèse of Lisieux claimed she found no other spiritual reading that could satisfy her soul like John of the Cross.Yet the v...

The Catholic Church has been a part of English history since the arrival of Christian missionaries to Roman Britain in the first century after Christ. England was evangelized in these early centuries to such an extent that, by the time the Romans withdrew in the fifth century, the Celtic population was largely Catholic.Anglo-Saxon England, prior to the Norman Conquest, was a land of saints. From St. Bede, with his history of the early Church, to the holy king St. Edward the Confessor, Saxon E...

When it comes to movies, people of faith often focus on negative assessments of the film industry and certain style elements that they find objectionable, such as violence, nudity, or harsh language. While these criticisms are important, they are not the whole story. A film's message and its method are not always the same thing.By discussing the cinematic techniques and the genre considerations filmmakers use to communicate their ideas, this book helps Catholics and other Christians to become...

One morning, attorney Dan Geary, seventy-seven years old, finds himself in the middle of a rolling, polychrome landscape. The greens are bold and bright. Birds sing in the distance. Tall grasses surge like a sea before the wind. He has never seen anything quite like it. But somehow--with the doctors and beeping monitors suddenly gone--he knows exactly where he is: the afterlife.What a relief not to be floating on a cloud, playing a harp. Instead, a hiking pack full of gear sits on his back, a...

One day, philosopher Peter Kreeft reads an open letter published by a friend, Nat Whilk. He's Catholic, but he sees the Church as unsteady, outdated, obsessive. As a challenge to the "True Believers", Nat pens a twenty-point manifesto for "cafeteria Catholics", who pass up certain Church teachings and scoop up others like a diner in a buffet line."I find in [Catholicism] both much to accept and even love and also much to refuse and even despise", he asserts. "If you insist on tying God to the...

Histories of the Catholic Church in the United States abound. Most suffer from an excess of either scholarly detachment or popular triumphalism. American Pilgrimage seeks instead to draw on the best of current scholarship to tell the story of the Church as it understands itself: the Body of Christ, divinely ordained yet marred by sin, charged with the mission of spreading the Gospel and building up the community of the faithful. In scope, American Pilgrimage narrates the story of the Church f...

This 27th volume in the popular Ignatius Catholic Study Bible series leads readers through a penetrating study of the Psalms using the text itself and the Church's own guidelines for understanding the Bible.Ample notes accompany each page, providing fresh insights by renowned Scripture scholars Scott Hahn and Curtis Mitch as well as time-tested interpretations from the Fathers of the Church. These helpful study notes provide rich historical, cultural, geographical, and theological information...

The Ballad of the White Horse is one of the last great epic poems in the English language. On the one hand it describes King Alfred's battle against the Danes in 878. On the other hand it is a timeless allegory about the ongoing battle between Christianity and the forces of nihilistic heathenism. Filled with colorful characters, thrilling battles and mystical visions, it is as lively as it is profound. Chesterton incorporates brilliant imagination, atmosphere, moral concern, chronological con...

The question of gender--who we are as men and women--has never been more pressing, or more misunderstood.Weaving personal experience with expert knowledge, Dr. Abigail Favale provides an in-depth yet accessible account of the gender paradigm: a framework for understanding reality and identity that has recently risen to prominence. Favale traces the genealogy of gender to its origins in feminism and postmodern thought, describing how gender has come to eclipse sex, and how that shift is reshap...

What does the Catholic Church teach about racism? What should Catholics think about Critical Race Theory, which is currently being widely promoted in the name of antiracismAll One in Christ lucidly explains the Church's clear and consistent condemnation of racism, showing that the condemnation is not a recent development but deeply rooted in centuries of papal teaching and Scholastic theology.This book also demonstrates that Critical Race Theory, far from being a remedy for racism, is, in fac...

Do you feel as though you're in the midst of a storm? Your life, your children's lives, and your country--they may cause you to feel like a storm is raging. In this powerful new book, Fr. John Riccardo breaks open the Scriptures to give us tangible hope for our lives. Discover how you can live with unshakable hope today!

What can the lay person learn from the life of a monk? Solitude and Silence are two pillars of monastic life that many people quickly point to as the hardest and most confusing parts of this kind of religious consecration. However, the great spiritual writer Thomas à Kempis, author of The Imitation of Christ, helps us to understand that all Christians are called to some solitude and silence in our lives while not taking on a complete eremitical life. He recommends the systematic and intention...

Maximilian Kolbe's decision to take the place of a condemned man in the Auschwitz concentration camp is one of the greatest stories of heroism to emerge from the Holocaust. This book brings to life for a younger audience the incredible story of a Polish weaver's son who grew up to be a priest, a missionary, and a martyr.Kolbe lived amid the political unrest, the social change, and the spiritual battles that shaped the modern world. In the thick of it all, he had one goal--to share the love of...

Ngo Dinh Diem, the first president of the Republic of Vietnam, possessed the Confucian "Mandate of Heaven", a moral and political authority that was widely recognized by all Vietnamese. This devout Roman Catholic leader never lost this mandate in the eyes of his people; rather, he was taken down by a military coup sponsored by the U.S. government, which resulted in his brutal murder.The commonly held view runs contrary to the above assertion by military historian Geoffrey Shaw. According to m...

This book takes us into the heart of the Soviet Union, where Alexander Krylov grew up as an underground Catholic in the 1970's and 1980's, never even entering a church until he was a teenager. How does faith in God live on when God is outlawed? 'How I Became a Man' shows us, offering glimpses at the everyday reality of Communism through the eyes of a child, with humor, irony, and a keen sense of human goodness. 

After a terrible misjudgment in the delivery room, Dr. John Bruchalski realized that with every pregnant woman he attends, there are two patients: the mother and her unborn child. In addition to this discovery, two remarkable spiritual experiences deepened his understanding of the kind of man he had become and the one he was called to be. Two Patients is the story of how a physician who practiced abortion came to question the medical status quo and to pioneer an approach to reproductive medic...

After twenty-five years of leading pilgrim groups to Catholic shrines across Europe, tour guide K. Troy has seen it all--long lines, strikes, broken-down buses, rebellious tourists, and countless experiences of God's immense providence. Crafted with wit and charm, this book gives a first-hand account of Christ's hand at work in all the beautiful messiness of pilgrimage. The stories unfold in some of the most evocative Catholic settings: Vatican City, the Holy House of Nazareth in Loreto, and ...

"Women Mystics" by Louis Bouyer explores the lives and contributions of five women mystics who have significantly influenced Christianity. Through the stories of Hadewijch of Antwerp, Teresa of Avila, Thérèse of Lisieux, Elizabeth of the Trinity, and Edith Stein, Bouyer illustrates the unique and creative spiritual missions of these women, emphasizing their role in shaping and steering Christianity. Highlighting the continuity and individuality of their experiences, Bouyer presents these myst...

"The Power of the Cross: Good Friday Sermons from the Papal Preacher" by Cardinal Raniero Cantalamessa presents over forty years of profound Good Friday homilies delivered in St. Peter's Basilica before the last three popes. These sermons explore the mystery of Christ's Passion against the backdrop of our contemporary world, highlighting the day of Good Friday as a time of both mourning and rejoicing within the Paschal Mystery. Cardinal Cantalamessa offers insights into the cross of Christ as...

"Theology in Practice: A Beginner's Guide to the Spiritual Life" by Roch Kereszty and Denis Farkasfalvy is a profound exploration into the essence of theology as the study of God, emphasizing its integral role in the spiritual life of believers. This work serves as a bridge between the academic study of theology and the practical application of its truths in daily living. Drawing upon the rich heritage of Cistercian spirituality and the wisdom of Saint Bernard of Clairvaux, the authors guide ...

"Genesis: A Bible Study Guide and Commentary" by Stephen K. Ray provides an in-depth exploration of the Book of Genesis, offering insights into our origins, purpose, and God's plan for mankind. Drawing from a wide array of sources including Jewish and Protestant commentaries, archaeology, and modern literature, this commentary presents a Catholic perspective on Genesis, addressing the challenges posed by scientific discoveries and uncovering the profound influence of this sacred text. Ray's e...

"Building a Civilization of Love: A Catholic Response to Racism" by Harold Burke-Sivers is a profound exploration of addressing racism from a Catholic Christian perspective. Grounded in Scriptures, natural law, Church Tradition, and our identity as God's children, the book offers a spiritual and deeply insightful approach to combatting the epidemic of racism. Deacon Harold Burke-Sivers, an internationally renowned speaker and author, provides a compelling argument for a response to racism tha...

"Aquinas's Lenten Meditations: 40 Days with the Angelic Doctor" by Saint Thomas Aquinas is a profound journey through Lent, guided by one of the Church's greatest minds. This book offers a collection of sixty-three Scripture-based sermons tailored for the Lenten season, from Ash Wednesday to Holy Saturday. Aquinas explores themes such as deepening prayer life, conquering temptation, and the virtues cultivated through reflection on Christ's Passion. Designed to detach readers from worldly conc...

"The Coming Christian Persecution" by Thomas D. Williams provides an insightful analysis of the escalating persecution facing Christians globally. Drawing parallels with historical persecutions, Williams delves into the forms of persecution in various countries, including North Korea, Afghanistan, and China, among others. He offers a sobering look at the millions of Christians enduring violence, economic repercussions, forced conversions, imprisonment, and even death due to their faith. The b...

For centuries, the Catholic Church served the cultural role of the principal patron of the arts. It is a historical fact that many of the world's most admired and treasured artistic masterworks are Christian in theme, origin, and location. There has never been a time in history when artists have not found inspiration and flourishing in the Catholic tradition. From the rustic art of the ancient Christian catacombs to majestic Byzantine basilicas, from the soaring Gothic cathedrals of the Middl...

How Platonic Thought Shaped the Christian Faith What does Plato have to do with the Christian faith? Quite a bit, it turns out. In ways that might surprise us, Christians throughout the history of the church and even today have inherited aspects of the ancient Greek philosophy of Plato, who was both Socrates's student and Aristotle's teacher. To help us understand the influence of Platonic thought on the Christian faith, Louis Markos offers careful readings of some of Plato's best-known texts...