Part biography of a wartime adventurer, part detective story, and part faith journey, this intriguing book from a New York Times journalist and bestselling author takes us inside the modern-day making of a saint. The Saint Makers chronicles the unlikely alliance between Father Hotze and Dr. Andrea Ambrosi, a country priest and a cosmopolitan Italian canon lawyer, as the two piece together the life of a long dead Korean War hero and military chaplain and fashion it into a case for eternal divinity. Joe Drape offers a front row seat to the Catholic Church's saint-making machinery—which, in many ways, has changed little in two thousand years-and examines how, or if, faith and science can co-exist. This rich and unique narrative leads from the plains of Kansas to the opulent halls of the Vatican, through brutal Korean War prison camps, and into the stories of two individuals, Avery Gerleman and Chase Kear, whose lives were threatened by illness and injury and whose family and friends prayed to Father Kapaun, sparking miraculous recoveries in the heart of America. Gerleman is now a nurse, and Kear works as a mechanic in the aerospace industry. Both remain devoted to Father Kapaun, whose opportunity for sainthood relies in their belief and medical charts. At a time when the church has faced severe scandal and damage, and the world is at the mercy of a pandemic, this is an uplifting story about a priest who continues to an example of goodness and faith. Ultimately, The Saint Makers is the story of a journey of faith—for two priests separated by seventy years, for the two young athletes who were miraculously brought back to life with (or without) the intercession of the divine, as well as for readers—and the author—trying to understand and accept what makes a person truly worthy of the Congregation of Saints in the eyes of the Catholic Church.
The various ethnologists and anthropologists contributing to this volume focus on the "self"-perspective in relation to religion and spirituality: on how religiosity is personally thought, dreamt, imagined, created, felt, perceived and experienced, in its various subjective forms. The personal motive and practice in religion is here put to the front. One can see this perspective also reflected in today's society, in the ways people, most strongly in the West, are nowadays dealing with religion, religiosity or spirituality, often drifted far away from the institutional church organizations. As a deeply personal experience, it is amazing how little effort is undertaken in a scholarly way to put the personal reflections, utterings and experiences into words. A wide variety of personal religious or spiritual experiences, Christian and non-Christian, recent and historical, are now described and analysed in this fascinating volume. Clara Saraiva is a senior researcher at the Lisbon Institute for Scientific Tropical Research in Lisbon, a researcher of the Center for Research in Anthropology (cria) and a Professor at the Department of Anthropology, Faculty of Social and Human Sciences, Universidade Nova de Lisboa. Peter Jan Margry is Professor for European ethnology at the University of Amsterdam and Senior Research Fellow at Meertens Institute, KNAW, Amsterdam. Lionel Obadia is professor in anthropology at the University of Lyon. Kinga Povedak is assistant research fellow at the has Research Group on Religious Culture, at Hungarian Academy of Sciences, Jose Mapril is lecturer in Anthropology at the New University of Lisbon and a research fellow at CRIA - New University of Lisbon (Centre for Anthropological Research). (Series: ?Ethnology of Religion, Vol. 1) [Subject: Religious Studies, Sociology, Anthropology]
In this fascinating, informative, and entertaining collection, internationally acclaimed, award-winning author Colm Tóibín turns his attention to the intricacies of family relationships in literature and writing. In pieces that range from the importance of aunts (and the death of parents) in the English nineteenth-century novel to the relationship between fathers and sons in the writing of James Baldwin and Barack Obama, Colm Tóibín illuminates not only the intimate connections between writers and their families but also, with wit and rare tenderness, articulates the great joy of reading their work. In the piece on the Notebooks of Tennessee Williams, Tóibín reveals an artist "alone and deeply fearful and unusually selfish" and one profoundly tormented by his sister's mental illness. Through the relationship between W.B. Yeats and his father, or Thomas Mann and his children, or J.M. Synge and his mother, Tóibín examines a world of family relations, richly comic or savage in its implications. In Roddy Doyle's writing on his parents we see an Ireland reinvented. From the dreams and nightmares of John Cheever's journals Tóibín makes flesh this darkly comic misanthrope and his relationship to his wife and his children.The majority of these pieces were previously published in the Londron Review of Books, the New York Review Review of Books, and the Dublin Review. Three of the thirteen pieces have never appeared before.
Drawing on the wealth of the Church's living tradition, Fr. Donald Calloway, MIC, calls on all of us to turn to St. Joseph, entrust ourselves, our Church, and our world to our spiritual father's loving care, and then watch for wonders when the Universal Patron of the Church opens the floodgates of Heaven to pour out graces into our lives today. Definitely a book for our time, Consecration to St. Joseph is dedicated to meeting the challenges of the present moment and restoring order to our Church and our world, all through the potent paternal intercession and care of St. Joseph. This book has everything you need to take your love and devotion to St. Joseph to a whole different level: a thorough program of consecration to St. Joseph; information on the 10 wonders of St. Joseph; and prayers and devotions to St. Joseph. Accessible, motivating, this book will kick off a great movement of consecration to our spiritual father and change the world.
Claire Martin's autobiography was first published in two volumes in 1965 and 1966. Already a prize winning Quebec writer, the author generated a wave of controversy with this detailed account of a childhood subjected to cruelty and brutality. Her deeply moving portrayal drew acclaim from readers who saw aspects of their own childhood experiences mirrored in its pages; it also evoked resistance from traditionalists unsettled by its exposé of family, church, and convent school some decades before the Quiet Revolution. Written with the passion of one who has known harsh injustices, this memoir nevertheless reflects the steady focus and narrative skill of an seasoned writer. With a richly descriptive style and deft ironic touch, Claire Martin tells her own unforgettable story of a young person confronting and finally emerging from the oppressions of unrestrained malign authority.
The first chapter of this book tells of prophetic events that are about to occur in New York City. The world as we know it will plunder into its darkest hour, and with no one to save Mother Earth, a hero will be renewed. From his nightmares, he will rise, unsure how he got to Saint Moses Hospital's care in the first place. Strange but odd events start to reveal itself through Saint Moses Hospital, the nightmares becoming stronger. Dave watches helplessly and afraid of the dark images that made its presence known. He begins to believe. Not sure if he was dreaming or awake, he begins to wonder about the images in the night. That which was hidden in darkness has entered the world in its purest form. Unearthed from the grave they were bound to by the will of God. The task appointed to the one entrusted with the scythe of life and death is now taken by the task.