Dr. Richardson has created a model of resiliency and salvation to help anyone overcome adversity in their earthly journey. He shares his story of triumph over his misfortune. The resiliency process and the Plan of Salvation provide the framework for this book. It walks you through the resiliency process and gives you a map to guide you to exercise your agency to progress, grow, gain strength, wisdom, and to ultimately thrive through life s challenges. Future chapters provide instruction on how to develop skills that will help you go through this process and resiliently reintegrate with each new disruption or challenge.
What if life didn't have to get you down? Dr. Glenn Richardson studied health and wellness for a lifetime, but it wasn't until he faced his own personal tragedy that he discovered how to become truly resilient. Using the plan of salvation, Dr. Richardson teaches you step by step how to thrive through life's challenges. Stop struggling and discover the hope you need to become a resilient saint today, no matter what you're facing.
Bringing together artifacts, texts, and practices within an interpretive framework that stresses the cultural work performed by saints, Kathleen Ashley presents a comparative study of the cults of the medieval Sainte Foy at a number of the sites where she was especially venerated. This book analyzes how each cult site produced the saint it needed, appropriating or creating whatever was required to that end. Ashley’s approach is thoroughly interdisciplinary, incorporating visual, religious, medieval, and women’s and gender studies as well as literary studies and social history. She uses the theoretical framework of "cultural work" to analyze how the cult of Sainte Foy was sponsored and received by specific groups in different locales in Europe. The book is comprehensive in terms of historical as well as geographical range, tracing the history of the cult from the early Middle Ages into the present day. It also includes historiographical analysis, examining the way the cults of Sainte Foy have been represented in various historical accounts. Ashley’s narrative challenges the boundary between "elite" and "popular" culture and complicates the traditional vernacular vs. Latin language binary. A chief aim of the study is to show how "art" objects always operated in conjunction with other cultural texts to construct a saint’s cult. The volume is heavily illustrated, showing artifacts such as stained-glass windows and wall paintings which are not readily available from any other source. This book will be of special interest to scholars in art history, medieval history, gender studies, and religion.
For too many decades, our Catholic Church has diluted her distinctive traditions in order to please contemporary culture, losing not only her patrimony but much of her moral authority – just when the world needs it most. Today, with our country and our Church suffering their worst crises since the 1960s, distressed American Catholics are understandably hungry for big solutions to their big problems. Fortunately, where today so many see only darkness, author Brandon McGinley sees light, arguing that these dire days offer us an opportunity to rescue our Church — if only we have the holy confidence to seize this God-given moment. Unlike many who have responded to these crises, McGinley does not propose that we return to an unrealistically romanticized Catholic past. Rather, dwelling in the perennial teachings of the Church, which have animated the best of ages, he shows how, with the help of much prayer and sacramental grace, we can reinvigorate our present Christian communities in ways that will transform not only ourselves and the Church but the entire world. With painstaking clarity, he unearths what was working — and what wasn't — in the decades before Vatican II, and he shows how genuine Catholic renewal can emerge only from authenticity to our Catholic identity and tradition, applied to the contemporary world. We have everything we need — we have Christ! — but we need the confidence to bring His grace and truth to the world. We live in a time when Catholic institutions are attached to the prevailing order, but McGinley argues they must operate without political fear as witnesses to the truth of the Catholic Faith with a boldness that emerges from holiness, which is the product of grace acting on our souls and in our communities. Here is our road map for renewal — a roadmap for families, for schools, for parishes, and, indeed, for the institutional Church. In this crisis, we can complain and despair, or we can seize the opportunity to demonstrate that the Catholic Church is the means to bringing the grace and peace of heaven to earth.
Saints are currently undergoing a resurrection in middle grade and young adult fiction, as recent prominent novels by Socorro Acioli, Julie Berry, Adam Gidwitz, Rachel Hartman, Merrie Haskell, Gene Luen Yang, and others demonstrate. Cyborg Saints: Religion and Posthumanism in Middle Grade and Young Adult Fiction makes the radical claim that these holy medieval figures are actually the new cyborgs in that they dethrone the autonomous subject of humanist modernity. While young people navigate political and personal forces, as well as technologies, that threaten to fragment and thingify them, saints show that agency is still possible outside of the humanist construct of subjectivity. The saints of these neomedievalist novels, through living a life vulnerable to the other, attain a distributed agency that accomplishes miracles through bodies and places and things (relics, icons, pilgrimage sites, and ultimately the hagiographic text and its reader) spread across time. Cyborg Saints analyzes MG and YA fiction through the triple lens of posthumanism, neomedievalism, and postsecularism. Cyborg Saints charts new ground in joining religion and posthumanism to represent the creativity and diversity of young people’s fiction.
"It's hard to be the only one." That single sentence from a teenage congregant sums up the conviction that motivated Christian Theology for a Secular Society. In these dying days of Christendom, the reality that most Western Christians face is living out their faith as a minority in the midst of a culture that is at every level--personal, institutional, and societal--secular in nature. While most living in Western societies still affirm belief in God and often other vaguely recognizable Christian beliefs, these affirmations frequently have little to do with how daily life is lived. The idea that the God best known to us in Jesus Christ is actually in charge of life is foreign. For most, Christianity simply does not form an overarching system of meaning that shapes life. Instead, life is lived largely without reference to God. And to live any other way is often "hard." In this volume, Mark McKim sets out to "do" theology in this context. How does one explain the core historic Christian doctrines in a way that makes sense in a secular culture--and in a way that will gain a hearing? What does it mean to be the church in this new situation? Throughout, McKim asks the question, so what? as he relates Christian teachings to a secular society and to what is actually happening in the local church. McKim's goal is to enable the singing of the Lord's song in the new and strange land of a secular society.
The popular spiritual writer Fr. Rawley Myers presents daily readings on the spiritual life according to the saints. Combining both the thoughts and writings of the saints along with interesting biographical facts and events in the saints lives, Father Myers allows the saints to instruct us on how to be like Christ. As Christ's closest friends, the saints knew Him best. They have the wisdom of Heaven, and are our tried and true guides to Heaven, for the saints take us to the feet of Christ. The saints in this book not only inform us about Christ, but they introduce us to Christ, whom they loved so much. To know Jesus is the heart of our faith. No one knew Him better than the saints. "Rawley Myers has provided us with a way to encounter a saint every day. In a couple of paragraphs or in twenty-five lines, we meet Augustine or John of the Cross, Gertrude or Vincent de Paul. Saints clarify and instruct. Father Myers gives us something ultimate to think about each day as it is reflected in the life of a Dominic or a Catherine Labouré." -Fr. James Schall, S.J., Georgetown University Fr. Rawley Myers, a regular contributor to several national Catholic publications, is the author of sixteen books including Daily Readings in Catholic Classics.
"Profiling Saints" follows and expands the papers presented at the homonym online international conference (December 2021), which focused on cultural, theological, artistic, and social aspects of models of sanctity and their importance in the modern world up to the post-revolutionary period. This volume aims thus to shed light on the cultural value of canonizations and models of sanctity as models of Christian perfection, including the role of iconography and artworks, in the broader context of modern, global Catholicism. The topics presented by the authors include veneration to, and canonization and representations of, saint theologians, missionaries, martyrs, mystics, and reformers, men and women. "Profiling Saints" looks at modern sanctity and saints from multidisciplinary perspectives, ranging from liturgy, theology, and Church history up to history of ideas, cultural history, history of emotions, and art history, and contributes to shed light on such a complex phenomenon of Christian history in its modern developments.
In 13th century Florence, the war between the Guelphs and Ghibellines is destroying entire families. Every corner of Tuscany has been drawn into the conflict, but little do the two sides realise their war is but a pale reflection of a battle between the mysterious inhabitants of the spirit world, lasting a thousand years. The spirit that guides the Cavalcanti family, Kabal, uses every any means at his disposal to make sure his family is not torn to shreds and eventually comes out on top. The true ace up his sleeve is the new head of his family, the warrior and poet Guido Cavalcanti. Guido is driven to seek an impossible peace as he strives to save his city and marry the girl he loves. He is helped by a young, exceptionally shy poet known as Dante Alighieri… It is a story of war, betrayal, intrigue and magic that is woven skilfully together to create a wondrous combination of historical accuracy and the fantastic world that lies behind human endeavour. “The Eternal War – Armies of Saints” is an innovative historical fantasy set against the backdrop of the Florence of the Divine Comedy. It has already conquered Italy and now, with the English translation, it is set to take the world.
